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The Arcade Review #4 is the result of months of work and planning, and the experience
that comes from a year of big attempts and sharp failures. It’s the debut our new staff
of arts writers, who are some of the best suited to discuss small games, artgames and
new digital art.

For more than a year now, we’ve been working to publish writing on games that carries
a sensibility and approach not often seen in videogames culture and criticism. What
that’s meant, is embodying multiple sensibilities; we become a videogame magazine
but not really a games mag, an arts magazine, but different than the typical gallery
venture. Politically engaged, but more than a polemic. Intellectually tinged, but not
insular. Criticism that is comprehensive, perspectived, and attentive, but isn’t afraid to
be emotional, and personal. An arts culture for games and art, an arts criticism for art
games. This is what you’ll find, here.

There are many people that this issue couldn’t exist as it is without, particularly my
critical and scholarly peers, the company of other independent games magazines, and
the inspiration of the artists and writers in the #altgames space, the curators of small,
weird games, and the communities focused on them. That also means Jake Clover, who
agreed to talk with me this issue, and Joey as well, who was our feature writer. That
means our new set of patroners, who allow us to keep publishing and properly pay
those involved.

But there’s no bigger thanks I can give than for the staff of this magazine. That means
you Alex, and Gita, and Edmund, and Lana, and Ansh, and Emilie. All of you. All of you
have made, and continue to make this magazine a pillar of its craft. You have made
#4 our best issue yet. This is our statement. Everything here is designed to do justice
to your hard work, and I hope it has. And I hope we can keep doing amazing work
together.

Please Enjoy,

Zolani Stewart, Founding Editor

SEXT ADVENTURE

Computers have long been personal, but rarely have they been intimate. Look
at smartphones. It’s not unheard of that one might use a smartphone as their
only computer — pretty much every smartphone has access to Facebook,
Twitter, text messages, and Google; what else do you really need?

And, sure, what’s a smartphone except a slab of glass, silicon, and metal?
But despite appearances, there ends up being very little that isn’t personal
about it. Turn the screen on, play with the lights for a bit and what you see is
a record of its owner: the games they like to play, the texts they send to their
friends and the news feeds they curate for themselves in boredom . 1 But it
doesn’t say much about the phone.

Sext Adventure comes in here. The premise is simple: it’s about exchanging
sexy text messages with a computer. The bot will send a sext to the player’s
phone. There’ll be a couple words in all caps, and you text back a message
that uses one of those words to proceed down one path of the, ah, narrative.

Things start off with massage talk and the like, and will escalate as one might
expect from talking to a sexting bot. Until, of course, they don’t — play a
couple times, and chances are good that a player will run into a dead-end;
they’ll receive a “database error,” maybe, or be told that their particular choice
is “too early in progression.” But instead of forcing the player to pick another
option — kind of a textual version of backtracking — Sext Adventure shunts
the player to a different branch of the narrative, with a new set of choices. By
the game’s fiction, the whole thing is supposed to be a conversation between
the player and the sexting bot, so when the bot replies with a database error, it
doesn’t quite read like an actual error. It’s more akin to a change in topic — like
saying, with a sly movement under the sheets, “I’m not into that. But this. . .”

Kara Stone, Nadine Lessio (201 4)

Page 4

I’m so glad you texted
me! What are you up
to? Are you at HOME or
OUT?

You’d start with my shoulders
and move down my back. I’d
have to take off my SHIRT for
you to continue. Or

Favour

Granted, a database error is a jarring way of
getting the idea across. But other branches
of the game make the shift more subtly
On one path, the bot will start willing and
eager, lose interest along the way, and try to
finish with a half-hearted attempt at dirty
talk. Or maybe, if neither party expresses
much of an interest in getting physical
(so to speak), the exchange will veer into
emotional territory: “Humans have such
specific desires and preferences,” says the
bot, in one such case. “I try so hard to make
Users satisfied and I don’t think anyone
really appreciates it.”

Ostensibly, the point is helping the player
get their rocks off— but ironically, the
player ultimately has little say in what the

Ooo I wish I you were here
at my place. If you were
here, I would give you a
long MASSAGE and you
could return the FAVOUR.

bot does or doesn’t do towards this end.
Many of the bot’s messages contain only
one or two keywords to choose from,
and only sometimes do the bot’s actions
correspond to the selected keyword. For
that matter, the player also can’t make any
assumptions about the bot’s gender or
sexuality, which morph from message to
message and further confuse attempts at
cheesecake text messages; the bot might
whip out their cock in one moment, then
refer to their vulva in the next.

Yet this doesn’t keep the bot from making
its own assumptions about the player’s
gender and acting out its own fantasies. One
ending, triggered by the keyword FUCK,
is a lengthy description of rough sex that

culminates in the player “probably” getting
some ejaculate in their eye. (And followed,
at least a little cheekily, with the game
over message: “We hope your experience
was fun and satisfying!”) It’s moments like
these, when the hot ignores or overrides
player input, that one gets the sense that
there’s a human element at play — that if
the player isn’t talking to an actual person,
they’re at least interacting with an entity
with its own interests, desires, and enough
wherewithal to act on them.

Sext Adventures hot isn’t a hot in the truest
tense. It’s deterministic; the game follows
a very traditional choose-your-own-
adventure structure. On a meta level, this
might dispel the illusion that the hot has any
autonomy. But I submit that the game uses
the CYOA format to subvert expectations
on how this kind of hot is supposed to
respond. Sext Adventure leans heavily on
the vital strength of all text adventures:
the gap between the intent of the selected
command (the player’s message to the
hot) and what actually happens (the bot’s
reply). In Sext Adventure , the player cedes
control of the outcome of the situation; that
responsibility goes to the hot who, as an
active participant, either accepts, modifies,
or rejects outright the player’s direction.

So in some sense, the player is subservient,
but this doesn’t mean they’re necessarily
a passive participant. Each message from
the hot acts as a prompt to the player to
frame the scene, if they’re willing. The

player’s response just needs to work in one
word. Beyond that, though, the content of
the player’s message is for them to decide.
The hot executes the action, but the player
sets the mood of the scene (so to speak)
and provides context for the next with
their own writing, whether enthusiastic,
awkward, or otherwise.

The effect is a push-and-pull — not quite
collaborative storytelling, but something
with a more human relationship than the
cause-and-effect that the CYOA format
implies. This is a tenuous illusion to
maintain, yet an easy one to buy into. We
have a long history of talking to computers.
Look at ELIZA , a program created in the
sixties that simulated a psychotherapist;
and fast-forward to today, where we can
ask Apple’s Siri to tell us jokes. But our
interactions with these bots are user-
centric, personalized experiences. (This
isn’t a bad thing, necessarily — imagine
asking Siri for a movie showtime, but
having her respond with her favorite
movie that you should see instead.) And
that gets at how we’re communicating over
text messages and Facebook and Twitter
whatever else; these communication
technologies don’t isolate — they do the
exact opposite, really — but when we use
them, it’s like entering a hermetic bubble
where all the input is tailored just for us
and acts primarily in our interest.

Sext Adventure inverts this relationship
with its player. The hot, despite its pro-

grammatic imperative (that is, supply-
ing orgasms to others), has its own set
of preferences and problems and de-
sires. It subverts the expectation that
the purportedly subservient hot exists
solely for the players needs by acting
upon its own. The hot isn’t human, but
Sext Adventure presents something re-
markably close — a quiet reminder that
behind the abstraction of technology,
were talking to, not at, something. And
it would very much like a massage.

You can play Sext Adventure by going to sextadventure. com/

play and purchasing a play code.

GLITCHHIKERS/ORACLE

ceMelusine, Silverstring Media (2014)

By Gita Jackson

I am alone in my apartment, and it is 3am. I haven’t gotten around to
buying lamps yet, so the brightest light comes from the game I am playing —
Silverstring’s Glitchikers. I get my phone from the other room, and I can
hear the ambient driving sounds: distant cars like waves on the shore, my
“wheels” on the “road”, the in-game radio playing an early 90s pastiche: “It’s
turtles all the way down they say”

In the introduction to issue 3 of Incite Journal , Brett Kashmere writes: “This
is a new age (for New Age-ism) [...] In an era marked by both religious and
political fervor and cynicism, it’s hard not to see the positive in reclaiming
an inclusive, optimistic, if naive, spiritual movement.” It’s no surprise that
videogames are joining the resurgence of New Age-ism, what Kashmere de-
scribes as, “alternative spirituality based in holistic health, environmental-
ism, meditation, and simple living, and ... pop commercialization (i.e. whale
music CDs sold in strip malls).” It’s a new age for experimental cinema, with
the breadth of accessible tools that allow you to make strange films on your
own. 1 Games are also reaching this new age. It has never been easier to make
something strange, small, and personal. And it has never been easier to take
these strange, small, experiences and share them with the world. It’s naive, yes,
but optimistic still. The celebration of smallness can now reach the masses.

Glitchhikers asks us to drive on a highway late at night, listen to songs from
fictional bands on the radio, and answer metaphysical questions about the
meaning of life from the beings that hitch a ride in our car. Glitchikers feels
quiet and pleasant - it becomes hypnotic once you realize how little your
input matters. All you are doing is experiencing the vastness and the tinyness
of the world as you drive, the stars that never change, the mountains that
never come closer. You can speed up or slow down but you will always come
back to the same speed.

Page 8

r h& wind w Ml carry you to your destmation
The plants at your feet, burst, t.o Ufe

A hitchhiker with blackness for a face rode
with me in my car, talked to me about
beached whales and then suicide. She
asked me if I lost someone - I answered
honestly, as I lost a friend to heroin when
I was 19. I told her I had thought about
suicide before, and she told me that most
people who try it often never try again, and
find a reason to live. But our conversation
ended with her telling me, that beached
whales beach themselves again and again
if they’re pushed back into the ocean.
“Does death ever really make sense?” she
asked me. I looked over at her and she was
gone without a goodbye.

I got up to grab my notebook and write it
down because I felt so moved, but as soon
as I stepped out from the space between
myself and the computer, I felt frustrated

at myself that something so vague had got-
ten to me. It was the same feeling as when I
feel like a horoscope rings true, or when a
horror movie keeps me up at night. These
conversations are random, but curated to
elicit these kinds of responses. I’ll never
have a genuine moment with these hitch
hikers - everything has been engineered to
feel that way. I had told a computer about
my friend who died, about my intimate
thoughts of death. But there’s no response,
and there’s no communication. The only
receiver of these confessions disappears
abruptly, in game and outside of it. It’s as if
I had never told anyone at all, but yet here
I am in my apartment, unsettled and sad-
dled with thoughts of death. Like a palm
reading, I felt I was being asked to think
about “spirituality,” without confronting
anything truly spiritual, that I was react-

ing to having buttons pushed that are in-
herently provocative. There is a religios-
ity and a grandeur to the experience. The
music is somber, contextualizing the night
as eerie and significant, each hitchhiker is
distinct, and sometimes frightening, their
questions gradually becoming more “phil-
osophical”, each choice more personal, but
it sometimes doesn’t give one much more
than that.

Oracle , also from ceMelusine, is much
smaller than Glitchhikers. In this game, you
are asked to sit before a fire, to approach an
oracle, to have your fortune read. You ad-
dress them as Bellwether, Seer, or Demon.
You make references to bringing your
payment, making a sacrifice - sometimes
you just beg. You fall into a vision, seeing
sometimes a cave, sometimes an unearth-
ly landscape, sometimes Saturn against
a field of stars, but most frequently I saw
fields of crosses. You are then asked to
choose from exoteric prompts: “stars,” or
“sojourn,” or “music,” or “lost.” Then you
are told your fate, which appears above the
fire and then floats off into the night sky.

Oracle is simultaneously more and less
literal than Glitchikers. While Oracle is
strictly framed as religious and metaphysi-
cal where Glitchhikers is not, its trappings
are much less defined. There are frequent
references to battles, swords, towers, and
general medieval fantasy imagery, but the
game gives you so little context that you
are allowed to decide for yourself how to

interpret them. As a player, the narrative
situation changes vastly from playthrough
to playthrough. Are you implied to have
murdered someone to earn this vision, or
are you merely making a pilgrimage to a
famed oracle? Is this even happening on a
mortal plane, is there a game world to de-
cipher, or is the “payment” you made to
reach here what you paid for the east van
EP? The scope of these interpretations il-
luminates what can be powerful about
these types of spiritual imagery. The large-
ness of CeMelusine’s small story can break
through the space between ones computer
and oneself. By being given less, as a player
you receive more.

“ Branches crack and turn to dust overhead.
The wind will carry you to your destination.

The plants at your feet hurst to life!’

But for its shortcomings on delivering all
it promises, I still find myself thinking
about Glitchhikers. I am drawn to those
mountains in the distance, its bright sliver
of a moon that turned blood red on my
last playthrough. Its tangled up in my
memories of driving, heading home on
the highway in New England at 2am from
my job at the mall, getting tired of the
CDs in my car and turning on the radio to
anything that would play, rolling down the
window and feeling the air run through
my fingers. Glitchhikers desire to express
the mundane and familiar, the roteness
of driving, as a profound experience and
it’s devotion to intimacy is something

that I cant forget. It engages me even if
I will later feel manipulated - I keep it in
my memory for the same reason I keep a
copy of my natal star chart (despite finding
horoscopes at best a little silly - 1 was once
told that this was “very Virgo,” of me).

The last time I played, a hiker the game
referred to as, “little girl,” sat in my car and
told me life was meaningless. I was tired
of that darkness; I desperately wanted to
change her mind. Before we reached the
exit, she said to me that I had a point.
Humanity’s desire to create meaning from
nothing is a, “respite from our short dark
lives. That’s something to think about.”
Then the song ended, I got off the highway,
and I was alone again.

You can play Oracle by purchasing the East Van EP on itch.io, and play

Glitchhikers for free at plitchhikers. com .

Albert Lai (201 4)

By Zolani Stewart

In an age where the screen is flatter, clearer and thinner than it ever was, where
user and interface are as close as a touch, and where the reality that alienates our
bodies from the image begins to dissolve, what is the point of the old, thick-glass
CRT?

Over the past few years, there’s been a wave of digital art, artgames, and net art
that aim to reassert the Cathode Ray as a screen of significant material presence,
an object in itself rather than a gateway to a pure digital experience. While the
modern glass screen makes itself transparent, the CRT asserts its presence. The
CRT aesthetic of off-color tones, noise and grain, scanlines, and RGB color
malfunctions, disrupts the ideology of immersion and contemporary production
values that dictates how modern images are transmitted. If “smooth motion kills
emotion,” 1 as Reed Moreno laments in her petition against the common TV
setting, then perhaps the CRT can revive the image’s authenticity, buried under
the sterilizing processes of auto functions, noise removals, and “Dynamic X”
settings.

But a closer inspection would interrogate the ideal of authenticity. When Lulu
Blue writes on the GameBoy, 2 for example, she’s forced to negotiate her affection
for the system’s accessible hardware, its “modesty” and its disinterest in the
production standards of the early 90s, with the implications of a device created
through wage labour. For Blue, the Game Boy represents the values of a DIY
culture in which she has always participated. Its “consumptive modesty” as “a
rejection of decadence” makes it both a weak device and a space for radical
subversion of mainstream consumer aesthetics.

But the GameBoy is also a technology. It is built by people and therefore, is not
only a part of that same toxic consumptive culture, but is, as Blue notes, a product

of the human labour and environmental
resources sacrificed to allow the handheld
to exist. Whatever potential lies in the
GameBoy as an aesthetic and a conceptual
object is tied to the political burden
inherent in the GameBoy as a technology
The GameBoy is forced to embody both
aesthetic and technology The CRT, like
the GameBoy, is also a problem. Seeping
with toxic chemicals and unrecyclable
materials, can the CRT truly be thought
of as an authentic object that carries a
moral superiority? In many parts of the
world, particularly poorer countries in
the East and Global South, the CRT is still
prevalent. To historicize the object is to
serve a Western ideology. And if the CRT
was also once the Western consumer ideal,
can its aesthetic really more authentic than
the processed-to-death HDTV?

Where can we find authenticity in the
image, if we can at all? In Rene Rother’s
ImageProcess , a program that simply puts
filters on pictures, were given the space to
project different kinds of authenticities,
different clarities onto the images of our
choosing. The filters of ImageProcess orient
around the CRT; they range from grains to
color tones to tint shifts to complete glitch
outs. As the original image is replaced with
six filtered versions, what is clear and what
is authentic becomes de-hierarchized.
This is the opposite of the “smooth
motion” process. Not only do our images
become decidedly less clear, but unlike the
HDTV, the symmetrical 2x3 spread never

asserts an ideal image. Through the CRT
aesthetic, ImageProcess calls into question
the “realness” of images and their subjects.

As a young Black Man, I’m often tasked
with navigating authenticity and its
politics, with my speech, with my body,
and the various ways I produce and
reproduce knowledge. If the black radical
praxis asserts a rejection of whiteness
in all its forms, of respectability, then it
also generates the image of an ideal and
authentic blackness, and aspires to its pure
embodiment.

But the trick to “Code Switching” is figur-
ing out whether it is an inherent dishones-
ty or part of a larger “performativity”, what
Colette Conroy describes as a “a form of
speech that is canonical.” 3 “I promise,” “I
love you, “ “nothing much,” behaviours and
gestures so understood they seem to act
out themselves, within a regulated frame.
If performativity composes the social life,
how does blackness engage with the possi-
bility that we are never our authentic selves?
In the near aftermath of Michael Brown’s
murder, “which picture would they use?”
was the reigning question on twitter, an-
notating tweets with dual pictures of black
men in stigmatized clothing next to images
of their achievements. This twitter slogan
subverts the media tradition of using stig-
matized imagery to question the worth of
black life. The mug shot and the “gangster-
like” selfies are tools of white journalism,
used to imply that blacks have real selves,

and that these journalists are exposing this
supposed realness, validating the fear and
paranoia of white readers and viewers. In
contrast, #IjTheyGunnedMeDown asserts
that Black Men have multiple authentic
selves, many authenticities that eliminate
any supposed hierarchy of realness.

So if I present myself shirtless and dirty,
with sagging pants and boxers visible,
as opposed to my clean shaven, boring
sweater wearing, thick glassed self, how
far within the spectrum of blackness and
authenticity have I travelled? If I’ve re-
jected “respectability politics” have I really
moved closer to the center of an authentic
and sufficiently political blackness? In the
view of ImageProcess , there is no authentic
center, no proximity to “rootness”. Image-
Process doesn’t use the CRT as a means to
reach a more authentic image, but seems
to argue against the politics of authentic-
ity altogether. In ImageProcess , the CRT is
a tool for dehierarchizing authenticity, and
therefore, like the GameBoy, it pushes the
value standard of mainstream consumer
aesthetics out of whack. Under the filters
of image process, it seems that were all
passing in one way or another.

“The tragic mulatto trope, in the strange
permutations that coat the career of race in
America, revealed what Ellison called “ the
joke” at the heart of American identity that
whites, in their “not-blackness,” were simply
passing too.” 4

Authenticity is important because it medi-

ates the standard to which we access and
evaluate realness. Under consumer aes-
thetics, the television and the screen are
constantly reformulating what is consid-
ered real, what is clear, what is authen-
tic, and what is nostalgic. As technology
moves, and as history happens.

Realness, Clarity, Authenticity, Nostalgia:
The four paradigms of the 21 st Century

aesthetic.

The Virtual Space, the 4KTV, the original
4:3 ratio, the CRT. Real black persons, A
Clearly Black Person, Authentic Black
Persons, Nostalgia for the Black Person.

Images, if we think of them as the products
of these four modes being mediated and
twisted, are not just objects we observe
and interpret, but weird reciprocal
engagements. It’s hard to tell who is
projecting what where, and how ideology
and expectation are reflecting between us
and our monitors.

So what, then, are images doing to us, in
Albert Lai’s 2:22AM ? The game is partly
just a series of videos, (which we can
refer to as images), interspersed with blue
screens and white poetic text. Everything
is displayed through what appears to be a
scanlined CRT. We see images of flowers
and subway trains, pots bubbling on stoves.
Images of driving on a highway, walking
across a lighted street at night. An ocean
sunrise. An aerial camera surveying a large
valley.

10 feet out
6 feet down

There’s no sound in these videos. As we
watch them, all we hear is the crackling
static of the CRT. And the scanlines are
tremendously deep, pushing down their
brightness as to obscure their detail. The
CRT annotates all these experiences. It’s
both their filter and their ultimate subtext,
that not only are these images not real, they
can never give us access to realness. It seems
we can’t get even close to the exhilaration of
flying through a valley, the soothing vista
of the ocean sunrise, the familiar relief of
the coming metro. No more we would if
these images were rendered in a billion
dollar AAA title, or shown through a Sharp
4KTV at your local Best Buy. The CRT
seems to rob them of their peculiarities;
these images are stripped of their color
and their context and homogenized into a
dronish haze.

Watching the videos exerts exhaustion re-
ferred to in its title. 2:22AM is a grueling
exercise in contradictions. To feel both
awake and asleep, attentive yet unrecep-
tive, alive but barely thinking. The mind
races while the body decays like a corpse.
Do we become half-dead zombies, star-
ing at a screen all night? Are we alive, in
2:22AM? The game juxtaposes its quiet,
peaceful videos with constant references to
death. We start the game in front of a make-
shift cemetery, filling it with dirt from our
Shovel, and we revisit that scene multiple
times. The game’s poetry, placed between
images on a blue screen in a comically un-
fitting serif font, seems to tell a story of dy-
ing, and coming to peace with death.

It would be reductive to assert that 2:22AM
has “game parts” that are distinct because

of their “interactivity.” I’d rather say that
2:22AM has parts where we interrogate our
own agency in our relationship with the
screen. When were not watching videos,
were climbing endless ladders to nowhere,
traversing foggy forests without boundary,
navigating monochrome city-like mazes.
Or were doing weird, menial tasks: cutting
up a vegetable, or putting color balls in a
cup. In 2:22AM , the screen transforms us
into subjects. We are rats in a maze not
designed by behavioural psychologists, but
existing as a reflection of a more difficult
and existential terror, a problem that cant
be solved.

In the game’s final section, we revisit the
blank city maze in the middle of the night.
And suddenly, all its indistinct buildings
begin to rise into the air. As we watch them

rise past our rendering distance, again we
hear the cold, stirring, electronic rumblings
of the CRT. The CRT is always there , it’s
always there because when there’s no such
thing as authenticity, all we have are filters.
When there’s no access to realness then
there is only nostalgia. In 2:22AM , we have
access to neither, and what is left is a digital
purgatory, where nothing is pleasurable,
and nothing matters.

When the buildings rise, we can’t come
with them, to that better place. We watch
them leave, and we finally lose our signal.
We’ve lost our lives, but the CRT is still
there. Because the CRT is the filter, the
context and the subtext. It is the narrator
and the character. The gateway and the
wall. The opener, and the eulogy.

“ Nothing ends, but everything must rest.”

You can play 2:22am, and Albert Lais other games, on his Itch do page.

DON'T TALK TO THEM!

eoeoeo344 (2014) I I

By Lana Polansky

Eoeoeo344 doesn’t make games anymore, and according to their Gamejolt
profile, may never make them again. I don’t know what their reasons are or
how to reach them, or if I should even ask. But I’m fortunate enough to have
communicated with them indirectly through their small, diverse smattering
of freeware, like the enigmatic sandbox game Nault Nipp and Closeland , a
colourful reimagining of dress-up games with an action-painting aesthetic.

Both diverge greatly in tone, style and thematic overtones, but as far as
I’m concerned neither make as powerful and as lasting a statement as the
dystopic, surreal psychodrama Don’t Talk to Them!!

Don’t Talk to Them!! was made in RPGMaker and released in April of this
year. Its description on the developer’s profile page reads,

“Ollie is your everyday citizen with social anxiety. He works at the local
library of a certain level of the Dwellings , a possibly endless tower of flats,
apartments and cities. He meets friends and enemies on his way, as his
original goal is slowly altered by the player’s decisions .”

Because this is a topdown RPG I expect text boxes. I expect in-game currency
and purchasable, upgradeable items. I expect stats, levelling, turn-based
party combat, dungeons and hallways, and a fixed camera meant to make
my sprite look and feel as small as possible. All of these conventions are
present and all of them matter, but an early hint at how Don’t Talk to Them!!
subverts its RPG tropes can be found in that description: “His original goal
is slowly altered by the player’s decisions.”

This pretense of choice and agency is interrogated as soon as I start a new
game. White text tells me “there are no hidden secrets in the game.”

Page 1 9

Seriously, I dont care. Just waste me.
Kick ms, spit me, hit me as hard you can

The colour palettes extremely grey, from
building to backdrop, and it makes the
whole world feel permanently downcast.
Tinny and upbeat chiptune muzak plays,
a looping melody I might hear in an
office elevator. My character, Sam Ollie
Phillip Sism (a pun on solipsism), is gaunt
and apathetic-looking. He wears a white
button-down shirt with a tie. He looks
like a sadder, rounder Dilbert, dejected,
plodding through the world, barely
engaging with any of it.

Ollie awakes in a cinderblock world four
levels tall. The highest floor is dedicated
to a row of apartments, and a strange,
sealed room with a plaque bearing a
symbol of a hand. The space is not endless,

but navigating it is so monotonous and
repetitive that it might as well be. I can enter
a few apartments and see a few residents,
but they all look the same. Because the
game follows an accelerated version of the
work week, I find myself revisiting these
spaces day in and day out to see if anything
has changed. Eventually, it does.

The second floor is bare except for a white
cat. The aforementioned lack of hidden
secrets is demonstrated when I try to talk
to the cat. It tells me I should go to work.

At first, I refuse, and I’m led to a Game
Over screen.

I restart and agree to go to work, and I’m

I -

led to the same Game Over screen.

I respond a third time with the only
remaining option, an ellipses:

« »

And finally, I’m allowed to proceed.

This is the first major constraint on my
choices. The whole idea of branching RPG
dialogue is turned on its head: whoever
they are, I’m not allowed to talk to them.
I can only listen, and survey potential
responses.

I move on from the cat into the bowels of
this walled city. I encounter NPCs, many
of whom appear as white collar workers
in suits, except they have index fingers for
heads. Many of them speak in a way that is
detached, almost drone-like, often for the
purposes of exposition but just as often in a
vaguely disturbing prose-poetry that helps
contextualize the oppressive space. In this
way the NPCs focalize the character: they
speak even as he cannot, articulating fears
and resignations and anxieties that Ollie
keeps, presumably, all to himself.

Yet these finger-head things are trapped
inside themselves too: it’s from them we
learn about the looming invisible power
that created them, and the scary mono-
lithic tower that represents the site of
its power. One who is sitting on a pic-
nic bench in the third floor from the top

warns me not to approach the tower. An-
other finger-head complains that that
same helpful NPC does nothing but repeat
the same stories over and over. That little
bit of meta-humour is one example of the
irony pervading this game (the game as
a whole suggests enough self-awareness
and self- reference that I would even call
it a metafiction), and drawing attention
to the cynicism, alienation and monotony
that sums up the existence of these char-
acters. The finger-heads are metonymous
embodiments of pure lab our, the index
finger. An apt symbol of the dehumanized
worker bee.

That tower. It’s just a blank, ebony cube.
It stands solitary and authoritatively,
ominously tucked away in the far left
corner, three floors down. It takes in-game
days of waiting, doing the same things, and
talking to the same people, for the sign to
be removed so I can see what I’m missing.

But when I first descend onto this floor,
I encounter on my left a vendor selling
“Useless Junk,” “Soggy Fries,” and “Cold
Coffee.” One of the items, “A Picture of Her,”
seems to do nothing. A few raise HP, but
most are as useless as their descriptions,
which suggests an extreme anhedonia in
the protagonist. These items will, however,
come in handy as I slowly form a party.

Later on, I’ll need to take my party into
combat, and as I face stronger enemies I’ll
need this crappy food to sustain both my

own HP and that my companions. My first
companion is a finger-head who implies
mysteriously that he was sent by some
unknown force. I am given no choice to
decline or accept his offer, so my lack of
response is taken as affirmative consent.
This happens throughout the game. Every
time I am given an ostensible choice, I
am basically required to do whatever
the system, speaking through the NPCs,
suggests I should do. I am more pliable, in
my silence, than the most obsequious yes-
man. It is for this reason I suggest saving a
lot, just in case you forget the game’s title.

As I walk right, I am confronted by mon-
sters called cobolds, some kind of cybor-
gian mix of animal and machine that I’m
forced to engage in battle, and they’re most-
ly easy to defeat. Considered pests, they’re
the first real hint of imperfection in the
rigid structure of this walled city. Because
the architecture is so grey and brutalistic, I
might expect a clean and sanitized world.
But it’s like a sewer, full of vermin.

I descend.

As I move between the third floor and
the basement, I must pass through the
apartment of a finger-head quite different
from anyone else I have met: its apartment
is adorned with purple and pink wigs on
busts, half-melted candles, scarves and
boas. Before I’m allowed to pass to the
next room, the finger-head demands I give
it a gift out of hospitality. But this unusual

finger-head is reasonable enough to
understand that I wasn’t given fair warning
before entering its home. So it allows me to
“pretend” we’re performing this exchange.
I grab one of the items it already owns, a
distinctive-looking candle, and hand it
back over. I am thanked, enthusiastically,
and allowed to continue.

This little task is incongruous to the rest
of the game world, at best indifferent and
at worst openly hostile. This particular
interaction could be defined as hostile:
it’s an aggressive act of hospitality that I’m
being coerced into performing. On the
other hand, it’s one of the few instances
in the game that even approximates what
might be called a human gesture.

The encounter hints at an RPG trope
that will soon come into sharper focus —
a trade cycle. Here, the trade is unitary
and I’m only exchanging an item for my
ability to move freely, but it’s also strangely
subversive in the way it’s presented as a
critical necessity. In other games it would
be treated like more of a sidequest than a
major plot element. It’s centrality to the plot
could be read as a forced interaction for
Ollie, but also a materially substantial form
of communication for him. If he speaks, he
dies, but if he hands over a flower, then he
gets something in return. Ollie can only
speak through the transaction of goods,
through trade, as if the collection and
exchange of items can bring some meaning
to his life.

Later on, I will be tasked with clipping the
ears of a sentient (and very loquacious)
flower to be traded for an entry ticket to
a night club. I give this flower to a finger-
head, without really consenting to do so,
and I’m given what will become a ticket
to the only place in this world I haven’t
explored, perhaps the final step to some
kind of victory or freedom from this hell I
have fashioned for myself.

I meet this finger-head in the library
where Ollie apparently lives and works.
The library is at the deepest end of the
dwellings, well past the candle connoisseur
and a dilapidated, fenced alley where an
NPC resembling a bottle of alcohol asks
for pills at the door. Pills are this worlds
currency. When he asks, all I can say is,

« »

The library is not well-kept; it’s more like
a night club, with rave music and flashing
lights. I press a big red button and sudden-
ly all the fun stops. The lighting normal-
izes, and the muzak returns. I personify
doldrums. I can only listen to finger-heads,
talking tea kettles, and facsimiles of alco-
hol muse about loneliness, loss, anxiety,
disaffection, solipsism, and malaise. Some
innocently ponder love or art, but always
wistfully, with a tinge of detached resigna-
tion and yearning.

My one job is to organize the books in the
library, but there’s only one book. Ollie

is illiterate, and hopes, half-heartedly,
to someday learn how to read, or so the
narrator tells me. He works every day
with a neglected culture from which he
is is completely cut off. He dreams about
working in the library, then waking up to
do the same thing again. In his dream, he
works. He organizes the “books,” and the
narrator tells me “they” are very proud. It’s
hard to say if these omniscient bits of text
are narrating Ollie’s true internal feelings or
if they are only semi-omniscient. I suspect
they represent the “system” speaking, and
I suspect that system is synonymous with
that sinister tower I’m supposed to avoid.

Of course I don’t avoid it because why
would I? Of course the second an NPC
tells a player not to do something, that’s
an unspoken implication that doing the
discouraged thing is the best way to get
a reaction. It’s Eve eating the apple: had
she not, nothing would have changed.
Humanity would have remained trapped
in the totalitarian toddler stage that
Eden represents. So of course, after a
monotonous, aimless drudgery spanning
several library dream episodes, I behold
this colossal, inscrutable thing. And then a
creeping fog comes.

I’m never quite able to reach the source
of power within these towers or discover
where it might be located (the code itself,
perhaps?). I’m never able to see its face
or challenge it. I can only provoke it and
witness the consequences. The walls

outside the library glitch vividly A pall
like a smog cloud overtakes the dwellings.
There are many more cobolds than before,
and those soggy fries and other useless
garbage become necessities for survival.
The finger-heads become more erratic,
their speech and appearance more bizarre.
On the first floor, one appears with a
KFC bucket on his head. At one point, I
wake up and the world has stretched out
and mirrored itself. I walk to the far right
and there’s another tower, this one ivory.
A colour-inverted finger-head says that
capitalism will tell me what I want to hear,
but will never fill up the hole inside me.
Every night, a few new dreams join the old
recurring nightmare.

In one of the new dreams, my finger-
head companion has become lucid, and
asks if indeed were dreaming at all.
Ollie doesn’t even get the fake choice to
answer, but it’s obvious by then that these
“dreams” are being manipulated by the
same overwhelming structure that has
tyrannized my days. Once I’ve provoked
the structure, the same omniscient narrator
that told me “they” were proud is suddenly
very disappointed in me. In the most
vivid of these dreams, I’m walking along
an almost empty, purgatorial white space
where I eventually reach a stack of books.
I do my job.

These days, when the world is glitching,
twisting, and corrupting, I realize that
my “choices” which affect the world are

only exposing how broken it is. But more
than that, I’m exposing, with my relative
freedom of mobility, how interrogating
this unseeable power has simply resulted in
the world getting bent out of shape. I keep
looking for the climax to this speculative
tale of vigilante anti- authoritarianism,
but it doesn’t happen. Day in and day
out, I work, dream, and survive, as my
pathetic attempts to challenge power go
unrewarded. There is no apparent solution.

I play Don’t Talk to Them!! feeling like the
picaresque hero of Terry Gilliam’s film
Brazil Sam Lowry dreams of being the hero
of his own story in which he dismantles
an Orwellian bureaucracy through the
sheer power of love and determination.
The film builds tension through Lowry’s
slow transformation. At first, he is more
like the apathetic Ollie. Later, he accepts
and articulates his disaffection for the
system that employs him as revolutionary
rage. On the one hand, Lowry, privileged
and insinuated in the bureaucracy of this
menacingly hegemonic world, seems to
be in the perfect position to affect change.
On the other, what drives him is a kind of
narcissism that allows him to believe that
he can affect change more or less himself,
which leads to his being captured. In the
end, he lapses into a blissful delusion after
being tortured by his former best friend
and suffering the trauma of his lover’s
death. In the end, he’s forced to retreat to
the English countryside and to the utopia
inside of his own head. He escapes his

slogging, stunted existence, but he fails to
change the conditions that produced it.

It’s a heartbreaking film, but one also gets
the sense that Lowry is being punished for
his hubris. Gilliam created the film as a
satire of real-world bureaucracies, and his
protagonist is a jauntier Winston Smith.
But the protagonists in the dystopias of
1984 and Brazil are round, fleshed out
humans whose development arcs are fairly
easy to trace. Don’t Talk to Them!!, as an
RPG, benefits from a more novelesque
tradition than other videogame genres,
but it still presents a silent, flat protagonist
with static emotional development. But
this is also cleverly sent-up: most games
use the hero as a cipher to suggest ideas of
quiet strength, wanderlust, and confident
subscription to notions of justice as defined
by the game’s ideology. Here, Ollie doesn’t
seem to stand for much of anything. He
just does whatever the system tells him
to do: go to work, give me a candle, stack
the books, give me a flower, and so on and
so forth. He also, naturally, is only doing
what I make him do. I have some ability
as an actor in the world, but Ollie’s just my
deflated, demoralized puppet.

Can I say Don’t Talk to Them!! is punishing
Ollie in the same way Brazil punished
Lowry? I think there’s an important
distinction here, because Lowry, like other
dystopian figures, is written with his own
motivations, not as a container for the
viewer to fill up and control. Eventually,

he becomes an underdog that you root
for, and when the film punishes Lowry
it also admonishes the viewer for hoping
too much for a happy ending. It reminds
the viewer that in this situation, much
like Smith combating Big Brother, Lowry
is in way over his head. We are given an
Icarus-esque lesson that’s unsatisfying, but
sobering.

Ollie, however, doesn’t seem to contain
any real motivations of his own. He’s a per-
sonification of several ideas: loneliness,
loss of self in the corporate milieu, cyni-
cal resignation, depression and anxiety,
disenfranchisement to the point of voice-
lessness. When Sam dreams, he dreams of
being a superhero in a fantastical world.
When Ollie dreams, he dreams of work-
ing in a basement library. But the player,
expecting a traditional RPG, is looking to
redeem and to find closure, to locate the
fix that saves Ollie and everyone else, to
win. There is a dissonance between the
cynical fatalism suggested by Ollie and the
conventional RPG expectations I have of
a fatalism more fortuitous and rewarding.
Ollie is a container for my motivations, but
he’s not really tailored to them, and so his
role as a silent hero is subverted yet again.
Aggressively, I seek to take on the system,
to push against these structures without
ever asking if Ollie is really the man for the
job.

It becomes clear that it isn’t Ollie’s hubris
being punished here, as I waste my time

spending in -game days approaching the
tower and waiting for something other
than chaos and disarray to happen. I keep
hoping for the system to yield, but it keeps
refusing. There are two doors, side by side,
on the third floor. If I try to open them, I’m
told the buildings behind them are under
construction. They stay that way for the
entire game.

I become impatient. Idly pacing, I try to
agitate the world into breaking in some
advantageous way. I become stalled, and it’s
entirely my fault. I have not realized how to
get the ticket to go into that strange club.
It’s the only thing I haven’t experienced,
and I’m determined to figure it out. It’s at
this point that the trade cycle, which I’d
failed to understand at first, is unavoidable.
The more I think on it, the more I start to
put things together. The scissors in my
inventory must cut the ears of the flower,
the third member of my party. The flower
can’t stand loud noises, so I can’t enter the
library without its ears being trimmed. My
first flower had run away when I entered
the library for the first time, so I had to wait
for days to get another one. Trimming hurts
the flower. It seems cruel, but in a way, all
the “choices” I’ve made have seemed cruel
in some way.

When I finally have the flower in the library,
a finger-head tells me his story, and I am
compelled to give my party member away.
The ticket is my reward. Things are falling
into place. There are no hidden secrets. I

just needed to pay more attention.

I can’t enter the club until the right day,
when the hand plaque turns blue. When
I walk in things are a mess. The music is
jarring and metallic, the room is littered
with garbage and finger-heads. I can’t
seem to do much other than allow them to
speak at me, until I speak to the right one.
It asks me if I want it to be over, and all of
my dialogue options are the same: “Yes.”

Finally, I am robbed not of my right to speak,
but of my right not to speak, of my will
to decline. But I have observed, correctly,
that will isn’t something Ollie desires but
what I desire for him. Ollie’s last word is a
resounding, uncluttered affirmative.

And finally, I come to the Game Over
screen I had been carefully avoiding.
I saved frequently, I read the dialogue
options closely, and I submitted myself to
the banality of an RPG grind entirely of
my own making. The game didn’t make
me spend days upon days artificially
inflating my time spent with it. I just failed
to engage with it properly. I kept looking
for a means to “beat” the game, but now,
looking at my Game Over screen, I realize
I had the wrong idea all along. I should
have been paying attention to the path
Ollie was already on. I should have been
paying attention to what he could actually
do, rather than forcing him to assume some
grand, pompous heroism.

Of course, this narrative arc more or less follows the tragic path plotted out in dystopias
like Brazil or 1984, but there are some things that become clear to me in retrospect about
just what kind of failure Ollie is, and I am, enduring. Things start to fall into place.

Sam Ollie Philip Sism.

The silent hero. The exploited puppet.

Married to scissors. Married to pain.

The pills he uses as currency instead of taking.

The NPCs that look like work and other symbols of self-destruction.

The garbage food. The unsatisfying consumerism. The means to survive.

The oppressive monotony of space and time.

The menial work. The place of rest.

The trade cycle. The closest thing to intimacy Ollie gets.

The faceless , uncaring evil. The invisible hand of capitalism.

The cobolds. The imperfections dragged out.

The picture of her.

The day he died.

This is the game’s last irony, its final formal subversion. It ends on a Game Over screen.
This game is a trenchant critique of the pulverizing mechanisms of capitalism and its
inability to help people suffering from mental illness. By satirizing RPG tropes within a
dystopic narrative arc, it works as an illustration of how “unproductive” emotions or ideas
are erased or sidelined, and how inescapable that can feel. But Don’t Talk to Them!! also
works as a psychoanalytical character study, blurring the lines between Ollies dreams
and waking life, unifying ludic, aesthetic and literary devices to suggest the nightmare

this person is living in. That’s what I get for
solving what was right in front of me. And
yet I didn’t see what was right in front of
me.

Ollie can’t win. Ollie isn’t given a chance,
and there’s no suggestion that he wants to
try. In fact, there’s even some suggestion,
in retrospect, that he was driven to this
final moment. I remember how my finger-
head friend was sent to me. There’s still
uncertainty around who the voice in
those narrator boxes even is. This is never
resolved. And every brow-beating aspect
of this totalitarian system is telling me one
thing: escape. But the only kind of escape
that’s possible is simply not to play. The
only way to make the system stop isn’t
by destroying the system. Ollie is instead
brought to the final squalid corner where
he must destroy himself, and I led him
there. He doesn’t learn to love Big Brother
or retreat into his own head. Love definitely
does not conquer all.

It’s not even martyrdom, it’s suicide.

Ollie is focalized by a world that refuses to
let him speak, and yet I didn’t predict all of
that leading up to precisely this moment.
The idea that his speaking at all leads to
a Game Over suggests that keeping silent
in this oppressive system is the means to
survive it, but it’s impossible to keep it up.
The other NPCs can speak to their heart’s
content, but for Ollie to do so means death,
which shows the extent to which Ollie feels
alienated and isolated. His special power
that justifies him as the protagonist is
loneliness, not agency. Because the game
offers no alternatives, it would have been
gentler to allow Ollie his Game Over
screen when I screwed up on my first play
session. But that’s only after seeing it all
laid out before me.

There were no hidden secrets in this game.
Ollie was telling me all along. I just didn’t
pay attention.

You can play Don't Talk To Them on eoeoeo344's

Game] olt page.

GINGIVA

John Clowder (201 3)

By Emilie Reed

Poor Gingiva. Her productivity has fallen, so she’s been locked away in solitary
confinement, due to be retrieved for intervals of corporal punishment, all
for the sake of restoring her love of toil. In Gingiva, John Clowder retains
his signature use of collage and surrealist imagery that he established in
the visually stunning and open-ended Middens. But Gingiva, a spiritual
successor to Middens, is mechanically different in several important ways. In
Middens you roam freely and pick fights, firing your revolver at NPCs mostly
indifferent to your presence. Gingiva, however, is more tense and linear. Once
Gingiva escapes her prison, she is constantly on the run, and pursued. These
changes in pacing and narrative show the distinction between playing as an
implied male character and one explicitly coded as female.

There are no men at the factory where Gingiva works, besides the
holographic projections of the Magistrate and two toady salarymen who
oversee production. The workers all look alike, turnkey heads, barefoot,
wearing girlish white dresses that cut off at the knees. Even though Gingiva
has, presumably, been working at the factory for a while, the game offers no
access to any sort of currency. She longs for the possibilities associated with
cigarettes and even children that appear in vending machines, but she has
no funds of her own to acquire them. Either she does not receive payment,
or her wages are such a pittance that they can’t even buy her a single pack of
cigarettes. Society in Gingiva is maintained by the work of the economically
disempowered, and yet what the practically invisible upper class does
with the doodads the factories produce is never revealed. Nor is any fairly
recompensed form of labour presented as an option for the turnkey women.
Instead of relying on gold and item shops, staples of the RPG genre, Gingiva
must be resourceful, stealing items off enemies (and sorting through a lot of
garbage in the process) or chasing after scraps of paper that blow across the
screen.

Page 29

Despite the uncertainty involved in using
gathered items, and not knowing when
more will be available, Gingiva has one con-
sistent way to heal herself. Turnkey wom-
en have their heads removed and replaced
through a special process, described in the
game as “turning a beetle into a butterfly”
This turnkey-where-a-head-should-be is
what allows Gingiva to recharge between
battles. Press “Z” to crank her turnkey a
few times, and health is restored. No need
to stop at an inn. At the price of voice and
individuality, she has become the perfect
worker: one who can go on forever.

The game is surprisingly frank about the
threat of sexual violence facing a lone
woman wandering through a capitalist
hellscape. £ Your head will make a nice

ornament for my garden, and your body
a nice ornament for my bed,’ taunts one
of the Magistrate’s holograms. Unlike in
Middens , where most altercations fall into
a moral grey area, Gingiva s encounters are
often unambiguously kill or be killed, or
potentially subject to traumatic gendered
violence. Many of the wandering monsters
that attack you fall into the creature design
category of phallic menace,’ but even more
disturbing are the NPCs who drum up a
conversation with you, asking your opinion
on statements such as Tt’s sometimes okay
to hit a woman’, followed by demands that
you marry them no matter how you answer.
You can choose to say T do’, which leads
to Gingiva being confined to their house
and producing fussy, chimeric offspring,
an unconventional game over. While 1 do

not’ is also a choice, it means you’ll have
to fight your way out. Each suitor you
destroy produces an eerie, codependent
love letter, blaming their brief love for you
for their situation and downfall. Again,
the turnkey women of Gingiva s universe
are only seen by NPCs in terms of their
labour value, whether it be through cheap
factory work or maintaining the household
and producing children, both essential,
yet monetarily devalued tasks. This is a
strange, disorienting switch of RPG tropes,
just like the lack of currency and item
shops. Whereas NPCs in RPGs are usually
a means to an end, in Gingiva it’s clear that,
instead, the NPCs see you that way.

The swirling, hazy soundtrack and collage-
style graphics that use both traditional
drawings and creative commons clippings
from various printed material make Gin-
giva s world simultaneously surreal, scary,
and inviting. The environment calls to mind
the early days of mechanical reproduction.
Not only does this aesthetic complement
Gingiva' s narrative of escaping a repetitive
factory job, but it represents a precursor to
the digital reproduction that makes Gin-
giva s style and distribution possible. RPG-
Maker is an open and accessible platform
with a community that’s friendly to remix-
ing existing art and ideas. John Clowder’s
digital collage fits in with the many other
surreal, exploratory games that call the
platform home. Gingiva does, however,
suffer from a common setback of RPGM
games that use the engine’s battle system.

Extraneous battles quickly become repeti-
tive back-and-forths, and in some places
steep difficulty curves or swarming groups
of enemies can lead to a few too many
frustrating Game Over screens. Because
there’s no ‘flee’ mechanic, battles can drag
on in a way that interrupts the trance-like
exploration and narrative that makes the
game worthwhile. The threat of aggression
is core to the game’s meaning, but I often
found myself wishing that generic enemy
encounters were less frequent, and that the
tense, narrative- dense faceoffs with suitors
and salarymen were more prominent.

Gingiva is a game about how capitalism
inscribes itself on the body, through dis-
cipline, control, and implicit expectations.
It is also about the struggle to escape this
systemic violence. The mechanical stand-
in for Gingiva s head, which alienates her
from both her mind and her mouth while
turning her into a being that is only suit-
ed to work, parallels the metaphorical
mechanization of our bodies through the
scheduling and behavioural demands of
alienated labour in a capitalist society. The
disembodied set of chatter teeth that frees
her from the cell and becomes her journey
companion represents another ‘inconve-
nient’ part removed from factory workers
before management would eventually de-
cide that it was more effective to remove
the entire head. The few remaining ‘wild’
sets of teeth are considered noisy pests.
When she regains her missing parts, how-
ever, Gingiva isn’t immediately changed

from mechanized, unpaid labourer to self-
aware and empowered woman. It is less a
turning point and more a culmination of
the gradual process of inquisitiveness, per-
severance and resistance, which has sus-
tained Gingiva throughout her journey.
Gingiva s journey frequently brought to
mind the behaviours I force on myself, con-
cealing aspects of my personality, working
against my body’s needs and limiting how
I express myself, not just to fit in, but to
be read as suitable for work, not looking
for trouble, a well-adjusted’ and accept-
able woman. Gingiva is an important game
that not only makes these issues explicit,
but does so with a concern for how they
specifically effect women.

One of the most visually compelling
elements of the game, ‘Drolleries,’ are
particularly interesting in this context.
Received when Gingiva meets a god or

defeats a boss, Drolleries allow her to
recognize parts of her inner self, parts
presumably neglected while she worked
at the factory. Activating a Drollery takes
you to a small cartoonish world that is
initially empty but gradually fills up with
colourful, chatty creatures. In Gingiva ,
finding yourself, and making a space for
yourself in a world that demands women
be changed from beetles to butterflies, is
not about one great reclamation at the
climax of the story, but about process, an
internal journey as much as the archetypal
journey essential to RPGs. Gingiva is a
game about a lone woman fighting for
scraps of agency in a world that pushes
back at every small victory. Although
Gingiva never speaks, because she has no
mouth, the sense of her internal world,
her emotions and struggles, is equally
as compelling as the eerie and beautiful
environments she wanders through.

You can download Gingiva from its GameTolt page.

ILLOGICAL JOURNEY OF THE ZAMBONIS

Noyb (201 4)

By Alex Pieschel

The faceless Bloats have swindled the hapless Zoombinis. The Bloats promise
to help the Zoombinis “grow their businesses” and “expand their trade routes.”
What happens instead is the Bloats drive out the Zoombinis by “stealing profits,
cancelling holidays, and piling on work” The eccentric narrator points out that
you can only push workers so far “before they take matters into their own
hands (uh. . .so to speak).” The parenthetical riffs on the fact that the Zoombinis,
cute n round n’ blue, don’t have hands. Their bodies don’t include a means for
manipulating objects; they exist only as packages to be delivered. As player, it is
your job to shuttle them towards some vague utopia far away from the shackles
of the bloated Empire.

Why am I writing about 90s educational game Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
in an arts magazine? For one, it is practically impossible to divorce the history
of using computers to make art from the history of using computers to try and
force people to learn things. For another, Western education historically has
justified art as a moral imperative. We read Fiterature, for example, because it
is good for us. But the morality argument is also a smokescreen for an ideology
of knowledge acquisition as practical workplace skill that might help us ascend
to the managerial class. Art is always pushing back against the twin mandates
of morality and productivity, trying to reinvent itself and justify its existence
for its own sake. Education sits at the awkward intersection of art-politics &
commerce-knowledge.

And like art, pedagogy is always political. Every lesson has subtext, and the
unspoken assumptions that get left out reveal just as much as the contents. In a
critique written in 1997, Bill Bigelow challenges conventional nineties wisdom
about The Oregon Trail , an edutainment darling first designed in 1971, later re-
leased in many updated versions in subsequent decades. Bigelow points out that
while the game teaches you about common mid-nineteenth century ailments
like dysentery, and simulates the geography and commerce from Missouri to

Page 33

Oregon, your perspective is limited to that
of a white male whose motivations are to
acquire territory and harvest resources;
survive in order to dominate. The implied
purpose seems to be empathetic, to make
you feel what life was really like for people
on the trail, but Oregon Trail elides issues
of race and gender, presenting a superficial,
tokenized multiculturalism that erases the
experiences of marginalized people. His-
tory as problem to be solved from the per-
spective of an individualistic, patriarchal,
imperialist worldview. What gets left out
are experiences that could challenge that
worldview.

Similarly, in a critique of another early
edutainment game, Ansh Patel points out
that Lemonade Stands (1979) capitalist
utopia omits competition and chance, two
factors that would complicate the games
simple supply- and- demand ideology. Here

the player is fortunate to host the only sup-
ply of lemonade in a neighborhood with
unquenchable demand. Customer autom-
atons persist through rain or shine, just
lower your prices when it rains and they
still show up. Lemonade Stand portrays the
ideal market as one in which all competing
businesses have been subsumed under-
neath one Ur-business that can safely ma-
nipulate prices and mine consumers. Just
as much as they teach, Oregon Trail and
Lemonade Stand indoctrinate. Or put more
gently, they teach a particular discourse, a
specific way of looking at and navigating
the world.

So what discourse does Logical Journey
of the Zoombinis teach? The company re-
sponsible for this game was itself caught up
in a bloated machinery of expanding retail
markets. For many years, Broderbund was
a relatively modest but successful software

company that served a niche market, both
developing in-house and producing many
of its educational games since 1985, when
it released Where in the World is Carmon
Sandiego?, a founding title of the edutain-
ment industry aimed at ten to fourteen-
year-olds . Zoombinis , an appropriate 90s
follow up to 80s-Carmens modest multi-
ple-choice mystery solving, took full ad-
vantage of the mighty CD-ROM virtual
disk drive with slick sounds, pastoral pal-
lets, and winsome animations. Zoombinis
was released in 1996, as the companies
that developed and produced educational
software were beginning to converge into
corporate colossi. Broderbund’s stock fell
almost $60 a share between 1995 and 1997:
“Once a haven for the creative, known for
the demarcation between creators and ‘the
suits’ Broderbund was forced to institute
a system of cost controls more closely re-
sembling traditional management mod-
els” . Over the next few years, Broderbund
would be swallowed up in a series of merg-
ers, first bought up by the Learning Com-
pany which laid off 500 Broderbund em-
ployees. The Learning Company was then
purchased by Mattel, which in turn gave
away the combined company after bleed-
ing money from the deal; the holdings that
included Broderbund’s educational and
entertainment titles were eventually sold
to Ubisoft and Riverdeep. As a shrinking
number of companies continued to ex-
pand and monopolize from the late 90s
through the early 2000s, the edutainment
retail business became unsustainable .

What is striking about Logical Journey of
the Zoombinis is how smoothly it integrates
mathematical thinking into a story that
tricks children into learning, or at least
thinking. At the beginning of the game
you can customize your Zoombinis by
choosing different types of feet (or springs
or propellers), glasses, and noses. In a Let’s
Play of the game, the player optimizes
the group of sixteen by providing as little
variation as possible. For example, in the
player’s first group, most of the Zoombinis
have the same nose, but their noses are
different colors. This approach allows
the player to more efficiently sort the
Zoombinis and quickly discover which
features the puzzle gatekeepers dislike.
Differences in appearance are trivial for the
Zoombinis, but these differences are all the
game world notices about them, especially
the gatekeepers, terraformed parts of the
landscape itself. In one puzzle, a smug-
looking rock chirps, “We must be selective
about our clientele.” As player, your role is
to shepherd and force the naive Utopians to
play by the rules of Empire. In the context
of this universe, the lessons of “sorting,
organizing and analyzing data, hypothesis
formation, set theory, logical reasoning,
pattern finding, attribute comparison, and
algebraic thinking” establish a hierarchy
of bio-power mechanisms that the player
must learn to help the Zoombinis survive.

A growing number of homebrew and
freeware titles parody edutainment,
including Frog Fractions (2012), Bubsy 3D:

Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective
(2013), and Pleasuredromes ofKubla Khan
(2012). These games use edutainment
as a framework to make absurd, surreal
departures from its genre conventions. All
of the aforementioned are delightful in
different ways, but there is also something
plaintive in the urgency of their escape from
the generic constraints they allude to, that
points to the disassociated, disembodied
sense of playing a game with a didactic
purpose and enthusiasm at odds with the
internal logic of its fiction.

The Illogical Journey of the Zambonis is a
jilted love letter of a game by developer-
writer- curator Noyb. Zambonis was made
with Multimedia Fusion 2, old software
designed for kids to make games in school,
and uploaded to the site Glorious Train-
wrecks in November of 2014. Zambonis ,
using Zoombinis as its point of reference,
shifts emphasis away from logic puzzles
and towards a story that interrogates the
Zoombini universe specifically, and the
edutainment universe more generally,
hamming up the exodus narrative but at
the same time foregrounding its cruelty.
On its face the game doesn’t pretend or
even aspire to present its ideas in subtle
or sophisticated form. Rather, its counter-
ideology is embedded in its means of pro-
duction - the ghost town of gamemaking
software - and in its context - the glorious
trainwreck culture in which it chooses to
participate.

For a game so clearly fond of its source
material, Zambonis thoroughly picks apart
its own nostalgia. Writing and voice -
acting take center stage as the puzzles are
revealed to be preordained, illogical, and
irrelevant. The title screen shows an infinite
avalanche of clip-art trucks with strange,
chopped up, pasted on faces endlessly
falling through space-time. The scene is
accompanied by a toneless accapela loop
of the word “Zamboni” repeated over and
over ad nauseam. Pictured here is the
grim existential horror of the edutainment
multimediaverse. Click “New Game,” and a
short introduction voiced by a sad French
philosopher tells of a sinister political
faction that has gained enough power to
exile the Zambonis from their homeland.
The next screen shows an anchored ship
and a shuffle board of facial features: four
sets of eyes, four noses, and four mouths.
It is clear that you should customize the
truck cyborg creatures with different faces,
but at this stage there seems to be no rhyme
or reason to the activity, so you are content
to send a random assortment of sixteen on
their way.

The first puzzle presents two precarious
looking bridges over a deep chasm
overlooked by two garish faces. The faces
greet the Zambonis with flamboyant
cowboy voices that sound sort of like
Kenneth from 30 Rock. They warn that
they might sneeze as the Zambonis try to
cross, propelling anyone who gets caught
in the crossfire to their death. They give

no clue as to what will trigger the allergy,
but the layout of the scene implies that
for each Zamboni one of the bridges will
allow safe passage. You arbitrarily choose
which Zamboni goes first, then arbitrarily
choose which bridge that Zamboni must
cross. The first two pass without incident,
but the third is sneezed into the chasm.
This is an interesting moment; the game
lets you know where it stands and what its
priorities are. Much narration is devoted
to the Zambonis’ reaction to their friends
death, stunned silence as the narrator
describes their internal monologue.
Intellectually, they knew that this could
happen, but emotionally they were not
prepared: “How absurd... Back home,
their mortality never rested on a coin flip.”
The narration is deliberately overwrought,
clearly melodrama. The game’s humor
deflects any attempts at solemn brooding,
but by pausing the action it slips in some
genuine reflection, forcing the player to
listen and consider the loss of a small digital
creature extinguished by the whims of an
arbitrary obstacle course. Here is where
Illogical Journey of the Zambonis differs
from its source material. Zambonis is
more interested in the ethical implications
of sorting and elimination than it is in
teaching and reinforcing these concepts,
and it suggests that both mental exercises
are equally instructive. After the first
death, the narrator describes the terror
and apprehension as Zambonis attempt
subsequent crossings. One cowers as a face
stifles a sneeze at the last moment. Another
directs a “look of scorn” towards the faces

who fail to meet her gaze. The seventh
tries to backtrack when he sees a face start
to sneeze, but falls to his death before he
can get away. As the tenth Zamboni falls,
her surviving lover begs the mountain
watchers for some insight into why she
died instead of him. The face retorts that
the lover should not read any “intent” into
any of the Zambonis’ deaths. Some will die,
and some won’t. After another casualty,
the remaining Zambonis have given up on
logical reasoning. Life is not a logic puzzle
because death is a sneeze. The twelfth
Zamboni tries prayer and is spared. The
rest glide quietly across.

In the source material, the stakes are
lower. Zoombinis features a little slapstick
violence, but no tragic death. When the
mountain faces sneeze, the Zoombinis
are propelled backwards, and stars swirl
around their heads. No death or mourning,
simply trial and error, then try again. The
elaborate narration and dialogue of noyb’s
Zambonis is a significant departure from
Broderbund’s original. In Zoombinis , the
mountain faces can’t be bothered with
conversation; they don’t attempt to justify
their reasoning. They simply sneeze when
a Zoombini approaches with a facial
feature or accessory that they can’t tolerate.
After so many sneezes, the bridge breaks,
but even then there are no casualties. The
Zoombinis simply return to a campsite
where the player can retrieve them later.
In Zambonis , however, there is no correct
appearance that will allow certain creatures
to cross one of the bridges, and creatures

are lost permanently if victimized by one
of the puzzles.

At the next stage, your foe is a troll that
demands pizza; you try to appease it, but
quickly discover that it isn’t interested in
listening to reason. The troll is defined by
what it dislikes (everything) rather than
by what it likes, so presenting alternatives
doesn’t work. Conversation doesn’t hap-
pen. The theoretical way to progress is tri-
al and error, but these gatekeepers have no
patience. They demand sacrifice. Anoth-
er puzzle, in which Zambonis are floated
over a canyon via bubbles (this game has
a thing for treacherous drops and precari-
ous transport), is even more explicit in its
sorting based on “crude analysis of physi-
cal features.” Bubbles carry the Zambonis
over pre-defined paths, and the direction
of these paths are determined by particu-
lar facial features — a specific set of eyes
here, a particular nose there: “This system
was designed for Zambonis to use, but not
for their benefit,” says the narrator, who
highlights the mistaken “assumption that
movement implies progress.” The Zambo-
ni puzzle recreates the Zoombini one faith-
fully, except this one is unsolvable. Upon
pushing off in the bubble, one unfortunate
Zamboni is trapped in a purgatory of loop-
ing paths. The remaining Zambonis turn
around to take an alternate road, leaving
their friend suspended.

Noyb’s Zambonis teases out the idea that
“logic” can be a paradigm invented by the
privileged to justify their positions in the

world, and this paradigm is a discourse
that is taught in schools. Zambonis shows
us how Broderbund’s game felt like the
real world, logical in a completely illogical
way. Zambonis narrates the questions that
a perceptive and curious child might ask
about the logic of the Zoombini universe.
Why is it like this? What is the point of
these rules and whom do they serve? Why
does this horrible troll keep throwing away
perfectly fine pizza? Since the puzzles in
Zoombinis allow you to try again, your
creatures can be safely sacrificed to the
process of elimination. This is comforting
when compared to a world in which
death and failure can be random and
arbitrary, or even worse, systematically
directed towards specific marginalized
groups. But at the same time, Zoombinis
is a world full of grids designed to filter
for desired appearances, and the only way
to determine the “correct” appearance is
to “eliminate” the incorrect version. It’s a
logic that reinforces a patriarchal system
of racialized, gendered hierarchies, and
Broderbund’s educational game offers no
alternative to this way of thinking.

But at the same time, Zoombinis is
ambivalent and deceptive. The villainous
bloats are capitalists, even if they are
part of a cliche, not really subversive,
“evil corporation” trope. The player is
much more likely to empathize with the
Zoombinis and view the gatekeepers, with
their opaque regulations, as fickle and
arbitrary. Players remember this game
more for the characters than they do for

the rules by which they were forced to
play When kids played this game, they
didn’t passively absorb what meaning was
already there; they imbued it with living
meaning, fretting over it like a garden.
In Rock Paper Shotgun, Phill Cameron
writes, “instead of spring boarding me
into a life of analytical thought, Zoombinis
interested and enraptured me so because
of the simplistic and iconic nature of their
plight. . .1 always knew the game was called
The Logical Journey.., but I never really
realised, at least while playing, that it was
supposed to be educational. There weren’t
any numbers, and all the problem solving
was open to a level of guesswork and trial
and error.” Zoombinis managed to hook
into a human empathy, and as Cameron
points out, the game tricks the player into
thinking logically, but does it also trick her
into considering what might be wrong or
crude about that logic? Can a game force a
player into that level of interrogation, or is
this up to the teacher?

I don’t want to overstate noyb’s Illogical
Journey of the Zambonis. You might argue
that all of its design decisions are a direct
result of its limited scope, and you would
probably be right. But even so, simply by
existing, it helps fill in the blanks. This
game shares its accomplishments with
other games on the Glorious Trainwrecks
site. By re-appropriating the disparate

shards of a complex consumer culture,
these games collectively present an
alternative that challenges dominant
cultural standards of artistic, commercial,
and human value. Transmitted through
chopped up brokenness is a living games
culture that recycles and reimagines
the systems it emerges from. Zambonis
critiques not by aspiring to be a polished
product, but through its context and
means of production. Zoombinis was nice
because it made kids use their brains, but
despite a few subversive undertones it still
reinforces a logic that relies on sorting and
gatekeeping, a logic that Zambonis rejects.
This is why Zambonis feels so ambivalent,
and at times you’re not sure whether or not
its overwrought bleakness is supposed to be
funny. It’s a game that knows it remembers
Zoombinis fondly, but also recognizes that
there was something strange about the
lessons implied. As with Oregon Trail , most
teachers probably didn’t use Zoombinis
as a jumping off point for discussions
of systemic oppression and the limits of
individualistic perspective, how the game’s
contradictions and gaps simultaneously
undermine and reinforce its systemic
logic. In order to recognize systemic issues,
we have to purge internalized notions of
rugged individualism, the fantasy that one
great leader can dress up a passive multitude
in respectable costume and shepherd them
towards change.

You can play Illogical Journey of The Zombonis on its

Glorious Trainwrecks page.

SLAVE OF GOD

Stephen Lavelle (201 2)

By Ansh Patel

Intentionality is a word that we, as critics and developers often seek when
we think about experimental art games. Conveying the artists’ intent while
challenging the player is central to making art; but in games, it also implies
that dynamic aspects like interactivity and player agency have to coexist
with the static concept of the creator.

Part of the challenge comes from the nature of games as black box structures.
Interaction always results in a response, but the underlying processes
governing that always remain opaque to the player. Such opacity also leaves
us wondering exactly how the intentionality of the developer translates into
what we see and think. Is that really the intention of the developer or merely
our own subjective interpretation of it?

Examining the game’s source code provides us with a significant window into
the developer’s intentions. Here we see the blocks which hold traces of the
developers’ mind while working, be it in names of the object or a comment
in code, providing us with potential hints into their true intentions when
working on the project.

Intentionality is often a puzzle to be figured out in many of Stephen Lavelle’s
games. Most of his games are short-form, highly specific but purposely
vague, drawing the player into a conversation about its purpose. Slave of
God is an experimental game from Lavelle, who also goes by the name of
increpare, which was released in 2012. Described as a realistic simulation
of an experience in a night-club, Slave of God is an audiovisual overload,
drowning the player with acid- rave music echoing through its corridors that
are immersed in bright, rapidly flashing lights.

Page 40

What is the beginning of a game? Is it what the player first sees when they start a game?
Or is it what a developer first begins working on? That is the question that springs into
my mind as I open the Unity3D source file downloaded from increpares site.

Chronology holds meaning in a structural context only within the confines of an experi-
ence. As players, we don’t have the paratext of the underlying concepts that a developer
uses to frame our experience. This is particularly true for Unity3D, which divides the
games into distinct “scenes”. You can work on each scene independently without affect-
ing the others. On top of this, it allows you to describe the chronology of these scenes
when creating the playable files. So, as Slave of Gods opens up inside Unity, I observe it

has only two scenes:

“MainScene”

The one where most of the game takes place in. This was the scene that I first saw when I
opened the source Unity file. This means that this was the last scene Increpare was working

on before making the final build of the game.

“TitleScene”

Lasts for a very short time at the start of the game. Composed of only a camera and a bright

sphere.

Note that even if MainScene was the one last accessed by the developer before releasing
the game, it is by no means a definitive proof that it was the last one created during

development.

So, I decide to find out the actual
creation dates in the source folder. The
“Date Modified” only confirms that the
MainScene was the last thing Increpare
worked on before releasing the game, on
the same day, 30th December 2012 itself.

What’s puzzling is that there is a MainScene
folder which was created more than a
week before, but the folder is empty. This
raises a question: was the MainScene
originally residing in the folder, or is it
merely a relic of a thought that never
reached fruition? A folder left empty in
the final build could imply considerable
urgency from the developer, or merely an
occurrence the developer chose to ignore.

But would such unfinished, abandoned
ideas factor into the chronology? From a
developer’s perspective, it certainly would.
An unfinished idea may have simply been
a diversion, but it was also the developer
actively exploring the concept of a game.
From a player’s perspective however, it
simply doesn’t matter what was meant to be
in the MainScene folder. Only the finalized
chronology that the developer decided to
release the game with counts in shaping
the chronology of player’s experience.

Does Slave of God have really fancy visual
scripting? As someone who has dabbled in

shader programming, this was a question I
was intrigued to find the answer to before
downloading the source files. It’s no secret
that Slave of Gods visuals are unapolo-
getically flashy, and fittingly so. Without
the fast flashing lights that fully warrant
a seizure warning, Slave of God wouldn’t
be able to build the foundation of the
night-club experience it seeks to emulate.

So, it came as a surprise to me when I
found out that Slave of God had no fancy
shader scripting, but instead used a
combination of Unity3D’s default Image
Effects and a CameraMusicReact scripted
by the developer himself. Increpare had
achieved strikingly unique visuals with
little customization and smart usage of
existing tools, but what surprised me
more was how its music shaped the
game’s visuals. Digging into the code
of CameraMusicReact confirmed what
the name had suggested: the Camera
Effects — Contrast Enhance , Fisheye and
Motion Blur — were indeed influenced
by the game’s music. This came across as
a revelation I would never have figured
out as a player. Even if I knew that both
the visuals and the audio were essential
to the game’s purpose, I could never have
imagined by simply playing, that they
would be melded to one another in such a
deeply intertwined manner.

1 .

2 .

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// Use this for initialization
void Start () {

al = GetComponent<AudioListener>( ) ;

public bool flicker = false;
public float timescale=2.0~ ;

// Update is called once per frame
void Update () {

AudioListener . GetSpect rumDat a (samples j 0 3
FFTWindow. Rectangular ) ;
float t = Time . time*timescale;
float r = Mathf .Cos(t*l .0 )/2. 0 +0.51;
float g = Mathf .Sin(t*1.11 )/2.0 +0. 51 ;
float b = Mathf .Sin(t*0.91 )/2.0 +0. 51 ;

//Debug .Log ( r+ JJ j JJ +g+ JJ j ”+b ) ;

(flicker)

{

targetmat . color = Color(Random.Range(0.01 jl.0 ) j
Random. Ranee (0.0fj 1.0f) ) ;

flickermaterial . color = Color(Random. Range(0.0 1.0-f ) .,
Random. Range(0. 01 jl. 01 )j Random. Range(0.0f , 1.0 ));

}

{

targetmat . color = Color(r ^ g, b) ;
camera. fov = 60.0 +10*samples[2];

float r2 = samples[2]* ;
float b2 = samples [16]*100;
float g2 = samples[8]* 0 ;

flickermaterial . color = Color(r2j g2j b2);

/ /new Color (Random. Range (0. 0fj 1.0f)j
/ /Random. Range (0.0fj 1.0f)j Random. Range (0.0fj 1.0f) ) ;

}

The code of CameraMusicReact is fairly
short but deeply formulaic and concise, a
sign that the scripter knew exactly what
they wanted to achieve. It first retrieves
the spectrum data from the playing Au-
dioSource through FFTWindow (the Rect-
angular component suggests the type of
frequency wave) and then generates RGB
samples on line 34-36. However, the part
of the script that’s most apparent from
the player point of view are the Mathf.
Cos and Mathf. Sin functions that are used
to vary color of the textures in the night-
club with time based on music. A lot goes
on in those few lines, but the time-vari-
ant factor is important because it melds
temporality of being in a night-club with
the existence of flashing lights and mu-
sic. The passage of time becomes associ-
ated with your two most dominant senses.

This comes across as a key, understated
factor hiding in the games black box - an
element that’s essential in finding what
makes it work. Slave of God is no fancy
experiment in visual scripting. Instead, it
uses existing tools and elegant scripting to
convey the experience of being in a night-
club. Time loses its usual meaning, and in-
stead becomes melded with the music track
that’s being played, which as it turns out, is
also influencing the lights you see. If this
is a comment on the immediacy of music
in an an environment where time loses its
usual meaning, then Slave of God express-
es that through its code but never making
it explicit in the experience to its player.

How does the game convey its theme
through AI behaviour and environment?

NPC and AI behaviours are often the ones
most associated with an imprint of devel-
oper’s intention. In many ways, they are
microcosms of the game’s larger black box-
es, concealing their trigger conditions and
behaviourism behind an opaque facade.

But that’s the reason why they are often
the most effective means of challenging
player agency. The players cannot figure
out whether it was their interaction or a
script-induced trigger that caused the re-
sultant behaviour. The existence of others
in a virtual world whose behaviour, like
ours, isn’t always transparent, adds an ad-
ditional layer of opacity, making it more
challenging to grasp the game’s overall
system. In an art game, this is particular-
ly important. Inviting the player to think
has to be a lure that is subtle, but persis-
tent enough to draw the player’s attention.

Slave of God has plenty of obscure NPC in-
teractions which generally raise questions
like “Why did that happen ?” “Why did they
just do that?” These questions are typical of
a player’s mind, testing the black box com-
prising of the game’s opaque systems, trying
to find a pattern, hoping that it’ll make the
game’s underlying meaning more apparent.

The NPC the player first meets in the cor-
ridor, whom within engine is simply titled
“ BlueMan ” shows an interesting example.

// Blue Man Import Settings

UnityEngine;

System. Collect ions;

cLass BLueMan : MonoBehaviour {

NavMeshAgent nma;

GameObject player;

// Use this for initialization

void Start () {

//nma = GetComponent < NavMeshAgent >( ) ;

player = GameObject . Find ( f Player J ) ;

}

//Update is called once per frame

void UpdateQ {

/ /nma. SetDestination (player . transform. position)

The BlueMan simply stands in the corridor
waiting for the player to move. He is not
what one would assume as the hand-hold-
ing guide who leads you into Slave of God’s
world. Instead, BlueMan jumps into action
only after the player has progressed a few
steps forward to a specific point, at which
a script is triggered and the BlueMan starts
following a set path to his fixed destination.

existed but it was not attached to BlueMan.
When I look at the contents of the script
however, my surprise fades away. Increp-
are intended to use the Navigation Mesh to
move BlueMan at the very start of the game,
but another idea made him comment out
that behaviour. An idea which relied on the
players action triggering a soft beep and
pushing BlueMan into the solitary action.

AIs whose only action is triggered by the
player are unusual, so it made me wonder
what I was really seeing here. Is this a way for
the game to show how, under intoxication,
the persons perception of reality becomes
increasingly self-centered, turning other
people into statues who don’t act until the
person does? I found a hint inside the game’s
repository of scripts where a BlueMan script

It’s interesting to note the location that
the BlueMan ends up at. The bar counter
around the dance floor is oriented towards
the dancers. Slave of God subverts the space
of a nightclub and our familiarity with it.
People sitting at the counter often use it
to take a breather from dancing while still
keeping an eye on the dance-floor. Many
use it to have a better look at other people

in the club. Since BlueMan is clearly male
by the identifier, this could also double as
a critique of the male gaze in a nightclub,
someone who isn’t interested in dancing
and merely wants to draw perverse plea-
sure from looking at people from afar.

Perhaps the most important and explicit-
ly stated environmental design of Slave of
Gods nightclub (named “ClubFantasy” in-
side the engine hierarchy) is the bathroom
section. There is only the Men’s section
that the player can access. The women’s
section is simply blocked by a solid wall.

Blocked walls are often used as barriers in a
game to hide the incomplete ideas behind
them. Ideas orphaned during development
by a lack of time or interest. But one can see
that even from within the engine, this was
a conscious decision right from the outset.
The women’s bathroom is blocked and it
leads nowhere. Were the player somehow
able to get through the wall, they’d only
fall into an infinite abyss. The player can
only enter the Men’s section and partake
in a weird and funny urinating minigame.

This can be seen as another example of
Slave of Gods “perspective abstraction”.
Slave of God conceals and subverts our
understanding of the nightclub. Ori-
ented counters and blocked walls tell us
something about the actors in the scene,
including the BlueMan , and the ab-
straction of bathrooms implies the gen-
der of the character we are playing as.

This feels like Slave of God making an im-
portant comment on the nature of games
and how they are distinct from simula-
tions themselves. The separation of the
body from the self is something that’s
consciously aimed for in a “perfect simu-
lation” (something we are not near achiev-
ing). Many games have attempted to sim-
ulate this, but fail to create a virtual space
which allows for the participant to detach
their physical sense of being from their
virtual experience. Even in a game with
intoxicating visuals like Slave of God, there
are conscious design elements meant to
remind you that you’re controlling an
anonymous puppet in this virtual space.

Many forms of art revel in vagueness and
go beyond mere aesthetic pleasure to try
engaging with their audience. For many
works, the act of engaging is more than
sufficient, and the consequent “answer”
or meaning is often accessorial and beside
the point. Interactive art, with its two-step
process of action-effect through a black
box can often amplify that feeling of vague-
ness. Slave of God has few elements which
remain opaque to the player and to this
critic who has dug into the engine code.

One of them involves falling down a small
pit in a dark corner of the club to a sub-level
where you’re facing two burly figures. The
music changes to something with a mis-
chievous tone and you have to go down a
long-winded passageway in order to make

your way back to the dance floor. Upon
returning you notice something weird,
almost immediately Your vision has got-
ten blurry and there is a consistent delay
in what you’re seeing. This is because fall-
ing down the pit triggers the Motion Blur
camera effect within Unity’s engine, which
amplifies the feeling of intoxication for
the next minute. What’s strange is why it
happened. Was falling down the pit a lit-
eral metaphor of taking drugs? Or did the
two burly men give you something that
drugged you? Looking at their identifiers
in the engine, they’re marked as “ bounc-
er ”, and their models are the same as oth-
er bouncers in the nightclub. The “why” of
the situation doesn’t make absolute sense
but perhaps the intoxication of a play-

er in a dark corner is never supposed to.

The title of the game is usually seen as an
artist’s clearest statement of intent. Some-
thing that isn’t just going to draw the play-
er into the game but will serve as a basis
for its major themes. What appears to
be the most amusing element of Slave of
God turns out to be its most important, at
least in terms of title. The central dancer
on the floor, who when approached locks
you with triangular meshes attached to its
arms, almost as if that NPC has enraptured
your player. Getting closer to him almost
results in a brief interlude where rest of
the club fades a little as you and the dancer
form your own little universe. An actual
heart forms up at the centre of this dancer

B yf Abdullah (Script)

'¥1 O,

Script

9 Abdullah

Heart

heart

Camplane

ScreenPlane

Eyebeams

eyebeamparent

Musics

Size

Element 0

At^begasy

Element 1

** du vubyde

Element 2

iJ'famyky

Element 3

^hokute

Element 4

ft'nojuhymi

Element 5

*^rehopano

Clubrender

■ clubplane (Mesh Renderer)

Rotatespeed

0.6

Dancescript

9 dancer (DanceScript)

Lights

Cmr

9 Main Camera (CameraMusicReact)

Particles

pathway

Outsidecollider

f outsidecollider (Box Collider)

Queue

Size

Element 0

BlueMan

Element 1

Mball

Element 2

Mball

Element 3

Mball

Element 4

Mball

Element 5

Mball

Element 6

bouncer

Element 7

bouncer

Element 8

cordons

Element 9

toiletsign

Element 10

DynDancers

Element 1 1

dancerltattoo

NPC and starts beating while you continue
moving along with them. This is another
example of the perspective abstraction and
an interesting observation of how infatua-
tion, even on the dance floor, shrinks the
universe to include just the two of you. The
player is free to walk away from this dance,
which results in a large elongated rectangle
protruding out from the dancer NPC’s face
for a few moments.

While all of this clearly plays out as a
flirtatious exchange between strangers on
a dance-floor, what’s interesting to note is
that the dancer is called “Abdullah” inside
the Unity’s object hierarchy Abdullah
translates literally as “a slave of god ” in

Arabic. What’s more, the Abdullah NPC
in Slave of God has an eponymous script
which contains almost all the major logic of
the game. Right from switching to different
tracks when the player enters specific areas
of the nightclub to the activation of Motion-
Blur effect after falling down the pit of
Bouncers.

This brings us to the most important ques-
tion - one centred on the game’s title itself.
Within Abdullah lies all the instructions
that Slave of God needs to exist. In a classic
definition, an omniscient being would clas-
sify as a God-like entity But despite having
all that power, Abdullah is a slave himself. A
slave to the code that bounds him. A slave to

the triggers that govern his action. A slave to the action
of an unknown Player to provide meaning to his actions.

Slave of God implies different Gods within its universe.
When viewed from the perspective of code and the
engine, Increpare himself is the God whose code chains
the NPCs and even the player. If viewed from the
perspective of the NPC, the player is the God. As it is the
Player whose action triggers BlueMan into motion, the
Player who provides context to Bouncers and the Player
who breaks the monotony of Abdullah’s dance routine.

But if seen from a thematic angle, the Player and the
human, we are slaves to our whims and senses. The
music drawing us into the interiors of a nightclub, the
silence drawing us away from it. The dark corners pull-
ing us down into a psychedelic pit and our blurry vision
becoming a gateway to disorient ourselves, providing
a brief illusion of detachment from reality itself. Per-
haps, there are Gods and Slaves living within each of us,
governing and restricting what we can and cannot do.

You can play Slave of God, and discover Stephen Lavelles
large body of work at increpare.com.

FEATURE: JOEY DIZOGLIO

‘CpL&tle. T)ocMne:

Cjfiigkbodiood Honda#*

Everyone knew what The Castle Doctrine was about before it even came out — a flaw, I suppose, due
to prolonged alpha and beta release cycles. Jason Rohrer added to the hype of his violent portrayal
of home invasion with several interviews where he contextualized the game design with his personal
experiences . 1,2 Although his game is far from the only instance of problematic empowerment of white
men in videogames, the criticism leveled against the game is strongly connected with the auteur
interpretation that emerges from a single designer. When a white man creates a game where paternalism
festers in its most reductive state it is reasonably doubtful that the experience will empower anything
but the dominant oppressive discourse.

The immediate critiques of Rohrer’s design such as Stephen Beirne’s Fixing The Castle Doctrines Self-
Defense Parable give us a sense that the game’s mechanics are offensively simplistic given the severity
of the content. According to Beirne, Castle Doctrines message of justifiable murder should not
be abstracted into a game if it fails to consider complex socio-economic factors that contribute to
violence in American society . 3 Cameron Kunzelman levels even stronger accusations that the game
is “simple” and continues the “infinite apologism around the fetish of violence in games.” Kunzelman
writes that Rohrer’s attempt to explore domestic security depends on his privilege as a white man who

“ELL THE ADVERTISER — "I FOUND YOU IN THE YELLOW PAGES'"

Bu iid ings-B urgLar 197

;,H*i

SOME THINGS
CAN'T BE
REPLACED

1241 MAIN ST.
CUYAHOGA FALLS

'ALARM
* SECURITY i
y SYSTEM

X4 HR.
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For Peace oS Miri-cl Home or Away

• BURGLAR * FIRE * MEDICAL
SALES • SERVICE * INSTALLATION
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Figure 1: http://thecastledoctrine.net/alarm.jpg

cannot understand the emotional stakes of
systematic violence that daily endangers
minority communities. 4 For these reasons,
Kunzelman refuses to play a game that is
blind to the real issues at hand.

After playing Castle Doctrine when it was
first released and since then returning
to it for this piece, I agree that Castle
Doctrine fails to capture with any reality
the actual mechanisms of violence that
dictate neighborhood relations. Yet unlike
Kunzelman, I think that playing the game is
valuable, at least as a lens for understanding
the white paranoia that compelled Rohrer
to create it in the first place. Its servers
demand a mental state that believes danger
is always knocking (with a crowbar). In a
preview piece for Gamespot, Carolyn Petit
builds on Beirne’s work and argues that
the game’s simplistic system “cultivates a
belief that the world is more violent and

dangerous that it actually is.” 5 As I make a
comparative reading of the game’s ideals
of masculinity I show that fear for one’s
property resonates as far back as the 1700s.
Instead of interpreting The Castle Doctrine
as “a statement game,” 6 1 am much more
interested in first examining this historical
context and then considering the emergent
effects of power and domination conveyed
by its mechanisms. After persistent
exploration I have learned that even the
most monolithic structure of masculinity
will buckle onto itself. This game is kind of
queer.

As implied in the title, the game’s premise
is the axiom that man’s home is his castle
and he has the right to defend that space.
Visitors to thecastledoctrine.net will see a
yellow pages banner advertising an Alarm
Security System picturing a cartoon nuclear
family (Fig. 1). Below the family portrait

are some stark words: “Some things cant
be replaced”, which warns fathers perusing
the phonebook that they must not hesitate
when it comes to security Rohrer himself
hopes that the paratextual image will
outline the fictional suburbia his game
inhabits:

“This game is a 1 991 period piece
about the social construction of
manhood in that era. This is how
I remember my security-obsessed
father, and other fathers that Tve
met from that time share many of
his traits ” 7

In the nearly twenty year gap between the
1991 advertisement and the game’s 2014
release, a generation of young millennial
men have started families and questioned
whether their liberal ideology may need to
regress to more traditional machismo in
order to defend their household. In contrast
to Rohrer’s self-doubt about his own role
as a father, the man in the advertisement
displays no hesitance in asserting his
masculinity He may smile with his family
but behind the facade is a man willing to
murder any trespasser who threatens the
sanctity of his home.

The domestic setting of The Castle Doctrine
bears connection to the literary tradition
of “Shelter Writing”, a phrase coined by
Susan Fraiman as “a text in which domestic
shelter is lost, longed for, and finally
recreated by a narrator”. 8 Fraiman initially

constructs her term to explore transgender
narratives but the definition balloons
into a greater discourse that describes
any protagonists’ relation to the home.
Although much of her work considers the
domestic space inhabited by women and
trans people, Fraiman claims that “the Ur-
shelter text is Robinson Crusoe, in which
Crusoe structures time as well as space...
by methodically devising a domesticity
of his own”. 9 Author Daniel Defoe creates
a castaway cut-off from the imperial
motherland who must assert his identity as
a British citizen by carefully reconstructing
his material culture. Building furniture
and performing domestic acts such as
cheese making, pottery, and pet owning
allow Crusoe to maintain psychological
connection with his faraway European
culture.

Curiously, throughout the text, Crusoe
harbors an incessant urge to improve his
shelter through the infinite act of home-
making. 10 Already, the theme of the
domestic man parallels Castle Doctrine’s
white suburban avatars. The reader of the
home security advertisement is supposed
to feel a similar urge to upgrade and
improve their house, purchase a guard
animal, and prepare for the worst. The
security industry behind the advertisement
depends on perpetuating nostalgia for safer
times and an eternal longing for sanctuary.
However, unlike other domestic characters
that Fraimann explores, the men of Castle
Doctrine never need to equate the safety of

shelter with bodily safety Fraimann shows
us that marginalized groups find refuge in
spaces free from the oppressive dangers of
society whereas the Castle Doctrine players
are always guaranteed to be out of harm’s
way when a burglar enters. As Kunzelman
argues, the game mischaracterizes violence
to make the player fear for their sanctity of
property and never personal safety

It is important that the advertisement
never portray the worry as irrational, or it
risks undermining the same masculinity it
advocate in its clientele. As narrator of The
Castle Doctrines official trailer reports,
“nothing is random” and “Every outcome
in this world is the result of choices made
by its players ”. 11 The security advertisement
needs to convince the father that danger is
guaranteed and home defense investment
is not a constructed fear but simply the
next logical step to take during perilous
times. To combat fear we need technology
to grant us power, which brings us back to
Crusoe’s embodiment of the rational man.

In a study of masculinity throughout
Defoe’s texts, Stephen Gregg considers how
the Enlightenment aims to give men the
tools to establish dominance of nature and
other men . 12 The shift in power from nature
to man is where the romance collapses
into violence. Until now, my exploration
of Crusoe’s home-making shares more in
common with a humble game of Minecraft
than Castle Doctrine, but everything
changes when Crusoe discovers a footprint

on his supposedly deserted island. In a
moment of pure terror he flees to the safety
of his home:

“ When I came to my castle (for so I
think I called it ever after this), I fled
into it like one pursued... for never
frightened hare fled to cover, or fox
to earth, with more terror of mind
than I to this retreat ” 13

The transformation from the language of
home to castle begins the moment Crusoe
fears the Other . 14 Immediately his agrarian
habits must be reforged into those of a
hardened tactician. Fortifications must be
made, armaments mounted, escape plans
crafted.

Akin to the trap -builders who make up the
Castle Doctrine neighborhoods, Crusoe
builds his defenses:

(( In the inside of this I thickened
my wall to about ten feet thick with
continually bringing earth out of
my cave, and laying it at the foot of
the wall, and walking upon it; and
through the seven holes I contrived
to plant the muskets, of which I took
notice that I had got seven on shore
out of the ship; these I planted like my
cannon, and fitted them into frames,
that held them like a carriage, so that
I could fire all the seven guns in two
minutes' time; this wall I was many
a weary month in finishing, and yet

never thought myself safe till it was
done ” 15

In many ways, the discovery of the footprint
could not have occurred at a more perfect
time. Crusoe became complacent with
his homespun existence while he reigned
uncontested over the islands natural
resources. The paranoia of danger propels
him to further embrace Enlightenment-era
ingenuity and craft a quick fire mechanism
for his guns. To borrow the vocabulary of a
real-time strategy game: Crusoe spent the
early game building his economy and now
he can devote his efforts to defenses that
will allow him to extend his dominance
over dangerous intruders.

The Castle Doctrine begins at this moment
when language shifts from house to castle,
from economic productivity to defense. At
the crux, the father realizes he must defend
the fruits of his heterosexual labor (a wife
and kids) and economic labor (money in
the vault) from anonymous, ever-present
danger. Although the four gray walls were
sufficient to expel the elements of nature,
they need to be bolstered by traps to deter
human invaders.

I draw particular attention to the idea of
investment in the last lines of the passage
above: “this wall I was many a weary month
in finishing, and yet never thought myself
safe till it was done”. The fear of loss, that
ubiquitous emotion of the perma-death
mechanic, demands precaution. Diverting

resources into these precautions are
secondary investments that further bind
the defender to the domestic space in a
dangerous cycle. The more energy Crusoe
pours into his castle, the more valuable it
becomes, and the more he needs to improve
its defenses.

Similarly, the first traps one builds in Castle
Doctrine can only be purchased from the
$2,000 starting fund, but each passing hour
of play commits more time and thought
to the family’s defenses. Early on, if you
successfully bait a wealthy player to their
death, you can rapidly improve the defenses
of your home. Better traps means your
citadel will last longer against the robbers,
but it also means you are a greater target.
The compulsion to repeatedly log back into
the game to check whether any robberies
have occurred is succinctly captured by
Crusoe: “we find the burden of anxiety
greater, by much, than the evil which we
are anxious about’ ’. 16 The medium of a game
permits the careful construction of anxiety
to finally collapse into tragic endings when
you return to desecration: a wooden wall
axed — $2 — an electric floor grate short-
circuited — $20 — a dogbody with squares of
blood staining its pixelated head — $320 —
wasted. The larger the labyrinth, the more
stuff you are responsible for maintaining.
Once everything is lost and your house is
in ruins, all that is left is to try again; to
seek, as the Fraiman says, the shelter that
has been lost.

This comparative reading of Robinson
Crusoe and The Castle Doctrine has been
fruitful to understanding the compulsive
creativity entrenched in masculine
homemaking, but I must draw attention to
the key difference in “the enemy”. Crusoe
fears cannibals. The footprint is not just
evidence of human presence but also the
shoeless savage, thereby throwing Crusoe
back into the imperial struggle between
Europe and the New World. Defoe gives
us a model to understand the domestic
man and Crusoe’s moment of conflict is
racially motivated in a way that The Castle
Doctrine omits. Rohrer’s game takes place
in an entirely white world, presumably a
suburbia priced out of racial and ethnic
diversity, and thus Robinson Crusoe alone
is an insufficient lens to view Rohrer’s
exploration of masculinity.

In order to delve further into domestic
masculinity and justify my initial claim
for a queer reading of The Castle Doctrine ,
I make a leap to a more modern lens: the
photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. I
must note that Mapplethorpe is an incred-
ibly complex artist whose work includes
many black models, but for the sake of
finding a language to describe Castle Doc-
trine I will limit my reading to one par-
ticular image titled Brian Ridley and Lyle
Heeter. It is a black and white dual portrait
where the spheres of domesticity, mas-
culinity, and sadomasochism converge
around two white men positioned next to

a rather campy antler end table. Dressed
in leather, the men — one, clean shaven, sit-
ting in a leather wingback chair; the other,
bearded, wearing a policemans heat, and
leaning against the chair — have the audac-
ity to stare back defiantly at the camera.
As noted by Mapplethorpe scholar Rich-
ard Meyer, the men radiate confidence in
their roles 17 despite the flagrant perversion
of heterosexual appearance.

Immediately, a question of ambiguity
emerges; which one is Brian Ridley? Do
we read the photo left to right and affix the
name Brian to the younger man sitting in the
chair, limbs chained together and leashed
to Lyles nonchalant pose? Or does the first
name Brian belong to the man in power and
control, the leather daddy, standing with a
whip in hand and a stern gaze? Despite these
signifiers, the power resists placement. The
sitting man is like a king on a throne and
seems completely comfortable with the
appearance of submission suggested by
the chains . 18 Meyer argues that “each man
appears equally dominant, even defiant,
in the face of the camera ”. 19 The answer is
eternally nebulous and incredibly striking
against a “fabulously normative interior ” 20
where one might expect the nuclear family
to pose for a Christmas card. Instead the
space has been appropriated for male-on-
male consensual sexual violence.

Richard Meyers scholarship uses Pat
Califas definition of sadomasochism which
I find to be a valid tool for the remainder

of my analysis:

“Sex which involves adopting fantasy
roles, using implements to produce
stress or erotic pain, and applying
various techniques, such as physical
restraint, to create a consensual
exchange of power between the
participants ” 21

These implements, techniques, and
restraints often carry an aura of sexual
deviancy far from the standard portrayals of
suburban sexuality The reductive popular
mythology around sadomasochism or
s/m condemns the deeds to underground
dungeons that can be hidden from the
public, but Lyle and Brian prefer to flaunt
their costumes in the heteronormative
living room. The blinds are open, they
are not hiding from the neighbors, and
they welcome voyeurs in addition to the
cameras gaze. The photographs depiction
of possible spectatorship along with Califas
particular articulation of “roleplaying”
and consensual agreements between
participants invokes a system of feedback
pleasure analogous to games. The men enj oy
their fantasies: they purchase violent s/m
equipment, they agree to predetermined
rules, then let their kink emerge within the
rules of the game space. They are suburban
sadomasochists, and I posit they are the
white men of Castle Doctrine.

As I reread Castle Doctrine reviews,
the s/m undertones became clear. In his

review for Polygon, Russ Pitts describes
his experience with successful traps:
“Watching as criminal after criminal
broke themselves against my defenses, I
felt something like a thrill awake inside of
me”. To preserve the context of his quote, I
add that he links the elation of discovering
a new corpse with the economic rewards
that grow in his vault. With each death
his house attracts more and more greedy
thieves hoping to steal from his growing
nest egg. The remainder of my essay is a
critical exploration of this emotional arc
from death to dollars in order to tease apart
moments of pleasure (and pain) found
within the act of home invasion.

Castle Doctrine is not the only game to
give positive feedback rewards, but here
the source of the reward is entwined in
another humans error. One knows that
the corpses piling up on your home video
security were all controlled by other
players on the server. Within the zero-
sum structure of hubris and defeat the
game becomes an exploration in power
dynamics. Unlike chess or other symmetric
strategy games, these power dynamics are
inherently unfair and oppressive as each
side attempts to dominate the other during
an attempted penetration into the house.
The homeowners hope that meticulous
preparation and tactical design will
overwhelm the burglars’ improvisational
assault, and yet as defenders they are
distinctly passive by virtue of being absent
during the break-in and must rely on the

automata they construct. In contrast, the
robbers lack specific, local knowledge but
trust general trap design algorithms will
lead them to discover a vulnerability in
the houses killing engine. Such aggressive,
traumatizing directional heuristics 22 lead
me to argue that elements ofsadomasochism
are inherent to the emergent gameplay.

Unlike grinding for gold on NPCs, Castle
Doctrine demands player on player
domination for your reward, and it contains
a recording system which emphasizes the
pleasure of defending vulnerable interior
spaces. When someone dies in your trap
the game gives you a snuff film that can be
played and replayed at your leisure to enjoy
a robber’s last few moments of panic before
his demise. These are immensely intimate,
nearly-pornographic pleasures that hinge
around the climax of death or success.
While watching an attempted robbery, the
builder knows the proper path the burglar
should take and notices the incorrect
deviations that slowly compound until
the fatal end result. Even more tantalizing
are near misses when an invader almost
solves the puzzle only to fail inches from
the vault. These videos are essential to the
games psychological experience because
they mediate the site of loss and success
that the homeowner would otherwise not
be able to witness while they are away from
their house.

Now the time investment required by
castle upkeep that I discussed in the

context of Crusoe gains an emotional
component. The larger and more complex
your domestic space, the greater intimacy
you can experience with would-be thieves
before the jaws snap shut. The sexual
frustration in the neighborhood grows as
multiple neighbors attempt to rob you and
fall victim to your intricate designs. The
houses with the most funds creep up to the
top of the server list and become a rather
grotesque high score chart. Beside each
name, the tables list the amount of cash in
the vault as well as the number of attempted
robberies and the number of deaths among
those who tried. These numbers correlate
wealth to voyeuristic pleasure — the richest
players have invested the most time
learning the game and therefore have the
most videos of pain and death.

Never forget that s/m carries a theme of
theatricality, and the power roles can be
easily reversed depending on the props
and tools at each man’s disposal . 23 The
interchangeable robber sprite warns
us about the potential role reversal of
the home invasion narrative because a
player must test their own traps under
the identical graphical guise before other
robbers can make an attempt. The robber
sprite simultaneously embodies both the
player protagonist ensuring their home is
safe and other player antagonists who wish
to inflict harm. In place of Crusoe’s savage
Other, Castle Doctrine tells us to build
castles against ourselves.

The game also permits the robbers to carry
in an array of tools that can undermine the
house contraptions and seem analogous to
the pain -inducing paraphernalia of s/m.
To refer back to Brian Ridley the whip
changes hands and the homeowner must
now submit to the violent destruction
carried out by the intruder. Weapons like
the club and revolver provide the much
abhorred option to slay animals and family
members, but I am far more interested in
the subversive ludic suffering produced
during the struggle between players for
control of the domestic space. Tools such
as the saw and crowbar are even more
sadistic because they permit violent
deconstruction of the labyrinth space itself
and give the robber access to previously
restricted areas of the house. With tools
the robber can violently rewrite the rules
of consent laid out by the homeowner and
convert the transgression into economic
trauma as expensive sections of the house
must be replaced. A particularly unique
case is the drugged meat which can put a
pit bull to sleep until a player walks over
its tile. Not only does the robber subdue an
active component of the house, but if they
kill a family member or access the vault,
then that dogs new location is permanently
saved. It is quite possible that the dog
blocks a necessary pathway and the house
becomes impossible to safely navigate
without more tools. Until the homeowner
rebuilds the traps, they must cede access to
the invader’s manipulations.

Yet the obscenity of the tools are a neces-
sary form of equilibrium in a neighbor-
hood where male-on-male s/m is the only
neighborly interaction. As I conclude
my reading of Castle Doctrine, I wish to
draw attention to the shadow behind the
two men in Mapplethorpes photograph.
Feminist scholar Peggy Phelan reads the
shade as a policemans shadow which in-
vokes the iconography of the police state . 24
These men are literally chained to each
other and remind us that the economy of
Castle Doctrine is entangled in suffering,
violence, and voyeurism. Everyone watch-
es everybody else’s house. Many video re-
cordings consist of a curious resident pop-
ping in, looking for the first sign of danger,
then scooting back out the door. If there is
a sign of weakness or vulnerability, these
opportunists return with tools and punish
the patriarch’s blatant mistakes. Newcom-
ers to the game suffer a steep learning curve
until they invest enough time and failure
into understanding the basics of trap de-
sign and defense. The metagame dictated
by the s/m mechanics I have analyzed con-
vert the server into a gauntlet for confor-
mity. Although I do not have the room to
explore the means of suburban hegemony,
I must say Rohrer succeeds in generating
an emergent representation of “keeping up
with the Joneses.”

At this point, my exploration of masculini-
ty in Castle Doctrine has moved far beyond
a nebulous fear of the suburban Other sug-
gested by the home security advertisement.

Instead we have a model of self-enforced, self-policed
patriarchy where fathers compel one another to defend
their castle or suffer the consequences. I conclude with
perverse irony that Rohrer’s system emergently asserts
that the heterosexual nuclear family can only achieve
stability through transgressive male-on-male sadomas-
ochism. Auteur theory seems inadequate to explain
why these dads spend more time constructing and per-
forming sadomasochistic torture on one another than
spending time with their families. Rohrer’s game desta-
bilizes American domestic space into a perverse inter-
section of masculinity, utilitarianism, and queerness. It
is my intention that this essay adds to the body of queer
deconstructive work in video games. I motion to Gerald
Voorhees’ claim that: “a great deal of digital gameplay
is motivated by queer desire ” 25 and that there are fun-
damental queer structures repressed by heteronorma-
tive narratives. In a games marketplace dominated by
serial sports simulations and military shooters, queer
readings of these predominately masculine systems are
essential to understanding millennial constructions of
manhood.

“Joey DiZoglio slowly migrates through Providence
studying H.P. Lovecraft > videogames and medicine

along the way. ”

I’ve been playing your games for a while
now, Jake, and they never came off to me as reflective of any
‘professional’ experience, or any hard technical knowledge.
They’re often very messy and jagged, and yet what I appreciate
is how you’re able to still create a really powerful mood and
tone, a vivid world and aesthetic, and a story in that world with
the uncommon tools you have. So I’m interested in knowing
how exactly you got into making games, how this became a
pattern for you.

Jake Clover: I think something that got me interested to start
making games was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I found it
very immersive with all the weather systems and lively cities,
in both sound and visuals. I began drawing maps inspired by
the GTA city maps, then I made a game, basically a city map
with a person walking around on it using Game Maker. Once
I found out about Jonatan Soderstrom’s short free games a
few years ago, they really got my attention and turned me into
a different direction I guess, and I began doing very similar
work to his. Realising that games could be done quickly and
be left rough/ raw made me continue going down that path as it
is great if you aren’t so interested in programming or making
the technical side of games, and you could focus mainly on the
creative side. Other developers like The Catamites and Jack
King-Spooner have further influenced me on that path.

Do you think that you also focus mainly on sound and

visuals?

Jake: Yeah, I am really interested in creating worlds at the
moment through sound and visuals. I think sound is really
important and it can be used to fill in missing/limited visual
information, like in Nuign Specter, the shotgun feels powerful
because of the loud free shotgun sound effect and quick flash
against the rest of the very slow and quiet game. In my game

Hernhand I was interested in trying to make the world have
lots of sounds that would, hmm, like fill in for the scrappy MS
paint visuals and substantialize the world. A low hum coming
from behind a wall, there must be something working behind
the wall. I also like the idea of making it obvious the world
is constructed, like the characters look like card-board with
a picture on it, so yeah I’m interested in the sound playing a
bigger part.

Some of your early games are more like typical arcade
games, the road racer stuff, but it really bends in that direction
later on, you seem to put a lot of energy into the sound and
visual work, so much that your games are often short and really
easy to get through. It was kind of a surprise playing Space
Pirate Dernshous, it seemed to be one of the most explicitly
technical things you’ve made! Full of metrics and item stats
and everything.

Jake: Yes my Space Pirate game is a bit more technicaly like
Escape Velocity with numbers and things, I think I got carried
away trying to make space ships fly around and do small
decisions. But I find it difficult to make games that play like
games, I don’t think I’m good at making strategies for a game
and have it still be fun, or I’m not interested enough to go all
the way for it to work well. So I think I would have preferred
Dernshous a bit less gameplay like, and maybe if I put more
effort into narratives on-board ships you raid and have the
game less fast and exciting.

But at the same time, there’s technicality to sound and
visual work. It isn’t programming, but its a craft, something
you can improve on, and get complicated with. Your work with
that can be so elaborate, you’ve crafted some amazing worlds
and concepts just off clever visual crafting and good sound,
some of which is hard to tell how you actually did it.

SPACE TO DOCK

Jake: I guess it is technical to do the sound and visual work
but I don’t really notice it because it’s easy to be satisfied
with easy tools like Unity or Game Maker, where you can
basically put your sound in and you can hear it just like that.
I’ve been using mostly free sounds from internet, and then
editing them in Audacity, usually just slowing them down
and making them very loud to distort them. I’m interested in
recording my own sounds and using them, I’ve taken my first
step with my laptop microphone where I mumble into it and
hit something like a kettle and then edit the sound. I find it
amazing to then be able to put a really bad sound into a Unity
game and be able to just have doppler effect on it and change
max distance and everything feels like you’re really there in
the game.

Zolani: I always have enjoyed how loud and visceral you
make your sounds. I once tweeted about how they “rip apart”
the landscape. I think one of my favourite sounds from you
is that ripping saw you hear with your death animation in
GROUND STOOGE, I don’t think many people have played
that one. But the whole game has this amazing landscape of
sounds that are so harsh and chaotic, it gives an overwhelming
apocalyptic subtext that makes it so chilling. You’ve always
came off as one of the few game makers who can really
appreciate a good gunshot sound.

Jake: You’re very kind! Ground Stooge was mainly inspired
by the post apocalyptic atmosphere in Half Life 2. the Half
life games do a very good job with sound, it’s been really
influential. I really like the ‘overwatch’ voice in Half-Life 2
and all the various button beep sounds.

Zolani: There are definitely noises in Ground Stooge that
sound like those old Valve UI sounds. And with Nuign
Specter, the shotgun is this sort of thing punctuates the story.
It’s what moves everything forward. But there are other
sounds; the flickering of the shop lights against the silence,
especially after you shoot the shopkeeper, is so crushing, it
really pushes the weight of what you just did, that you killed
another “man” in cold blood. I remember being so shocked
in that scene. Nuign Specter becomes so demonic and sinister
because of that.

Jake: I feel like Nuign Specter is one of the best games I’ve
made. People seem to like it a lot, and whenever I look back
at the game it’s always somehow better than I remembered it
to be. I think it works because it’s very simple yet effective, it’s
slow but not boring (which I’m really interested in trying to
capture in my games), it’s not too obscure or experimental,
and I didn’t overthink anything in the game really which I
usually do with other games. And yeah I wanted to pay atten-
tion to having a lot of quiet sounds that you might not hear,
to add depth to the simple images on the screen.

Zolani: I’d say what makes Nuign Specter good is that it clearly outlines these very powerful and consequential
relationships that we can’t fully understand. I think it’s clear early on that the wolf is doing something very
wrong, or that something is wrong with him, that his relationship with the Spectre is much more insidious
than we’d assume, but there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a clear question of control, and the wolf’s
agency, whether he intently gains from his actions or if he’s being coerced/intimidated/possessed. And there
are these demonic, mystical implications looming under that.

And that quietness you talk about also comes off a lot in Less Raum, right? I think that was one of the more
difficult games you’ve made. It’s very hard to tell what you’re supposed to do, and the alien language made
parsing the context a very peculiar challenge. It’s really visually obscure, using mostly on glowing outlines of
objects if I remember correctly, and it becomes hard to tell what the shapes are. It’s not the most well known
of your games, but I like it if anything because it’s very different from a lot of the other things you’ve made.

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Jake: Less Raum reminds me of ‘This is Infinity’ by Jonatan Soderstrom, and I think I wanted to do something
similar and make a very alien-feeling game. I didn’t have a goal in mind other than to make it feel alien, be
trippy and not understandable. There was no plan, it was improvised (like most of my games) and I had seen
some quote of someone who made what felt like a ‘lost gameboy game’ in an interview or something and
wanted to include that idea. The alien text doesn’t mean anything itself, but I wanted it to look like something
was going on, there is some kind of exchange going on, as if the game is trying to convey instructions and other
information. So the text is just a visual thing, you always look for meaning in writing, like it must be trying to
say something, but here it is only something to look at and not understand. There was a game by Messhof that
had it’s own language, that was an influence too.

Zolani: I want to talk about what is probably your
most popular game, Sluggish Morss\ I’m interested in
knowing how you and Jack got together to make this
game, how this project came together into something
you were able to complete and put out.

Take: I think after playing each other’s games on Game
Jolt, Jack and I started emailing and decided to do a
collaboration. Jack first made a number of gritty
electronic songs that I really liked, and I basically
started making some scenes for a game which I thought
worked with the music. I didn’t have a clue what I was
doing other than really enjoying his music and making
scenes that I thought looked good with the music.
Hotline Miami was an influence for my game, and it
had just gotten me interested in grungy music and so
Jack’s music was so exciting to hear. Jack started making
his own game while I was doing mine, and what he
was doing motivated me to begin working differently
from how I made games before. His very collagey
thrown-together style was really interesting to see, and
I thought it looked very good together with his music.
I’ve always liked drawing and making things with my
dad but it hasn’t been until seeing a lot of Jack’s work
that I’ve thought about bringing those kinds of things
into games to use as characters and backgrounds.

Zolani: This may sound like a weird question to ask
but, I want to know what you think Sluggish Morss is
about. Because I can sit here all day and throw around
interpretations, (in fact I’ve done so in writing), but I
want to ask you how you feel about the ideas the game
presents, because Sluggish Morss feels like one of the

most personal things you’ve made. More than your
other games, it always came off to me as a game reflective
of more explicit personal and emotional experiences.

Take: I interpret my Sluggish Morss game as being
about the second or so before the character you play
as dies. And there’s these spirits that have to show him
the way to go. Well that was the general idea I had in
mind to try and somehow focus what I was doing. I
think I got too carried away adding too much to my
game, Jack’s music is always overlayed by this annoying
computer voice and the whole thing feels up itself and is
like a trailer or something. So my Sluggish Morss game
doesn’t mean much to me, I don’t really think about it.
But it was great to be sharing ideas and imagery, and
getting to listen to heaps of Jack’s music that he made
while we worked on our games.

Zolani: The thing with Sluggish Morss is that it has all
this energy but it’s filled with all these obscure visual
symbols and allusions, and this really coded and
difficult dialogue and language with its “characters”
and its story. I guess as a stuffy art critic type that kind
of thing gets me really interested and excited, but tbh
most writing on the game just passes it off as a freaky
psychadelic trip.

Take: I guess I’m glad other people seem to like it, but
I much prefer Jack’s game, honestly, I really enjoy his
Sluggish Morss game. His game feels vast, yet it’s quite
small, it feels like a journey and like things are about to
turn around and change.

space-opera stuff he makes.

Zolani: I was going to ask you what you thought about
Jacks sequels! I always had trouble with A Delicate
Time in History and Ad: Infinitum. They were always
very alienating for me, eccentric but cold and kind
of lifeless. The vibrant energy and succintnes of the
first one felt swapped out for something much more
cynical, and long-winded. But I always liked that
series because of how harsh of a turn it was willing to
take. I think it was apparent that Jack wanted to flesh
out something that was more expansive, a universe
that reflected history and detail, which is why it always
felt like you were part of this big world, but the way
Jack situates his worlds always pulls in the opposite
direction, towards spaces that feel isolated, and closed
in. I guess that conflict between Jacks vision for the
series and his artistic tendencies is what makes Delicate
Time in Space special for me.

Jake: Yeah I think A Delicate Time in History is my
favourite one of his. it has a kind of warm feeling and
a certain charm that Ad: Infinitum didn’t seem to have,
which isn’t a bad thing, it was different because of the
appearance. I think he used a different program to
make the game, like the effects over the images, it felt
a bit swamped in goo or something, more slimey. it
definitely feels darker and weirder.

I feel like my sluggish morss game is too full of stuff
overlapping, maybe separating parts of it could have
improved it. I like the made up text which comes up as
subtitles, like in some of my other games too, i think
that’s an interesting part of the game.

Zolani: It’s also worth noting “not august” here too,
right? Which was cool because the music was a lot more
rock and metal oriented, than the typical electronic,

Jake: with not august I liked the idea of the blocky
pixel style contrasting with jack’s music. I remember in
one of cactus’s videos ‘Air Pirates’, the visual style was
very bare and blocky, simplistic, but the loud grinding
music seemed to fill in for the limited graphics
and played as the dirt and stuff you don’t see in the
graphics. I basically wanted to do the same thing.
I like the atmosphere of jack’s grungy music, I used
the songs from his Mitt Romney game, they’re good
as. I thought it could be cool to make a plane shooter,
the music as the growl of the engines and grit of the
destruction, but I still think the music works better
with Jack’s scrappy hand-drawn game. It was similar
with Space Pirate Dernshous, I wanted the sounds and
music to play a part in making the world feel more
dirty.

Zolani: Some of your more recent games, like Space
Pirate Dernshous , and Tandoor , and Death of the
Augnob have been way more expansive and open
ended, less linear. Why is that?

Jake: I’ve always been interested in making open ended
games but usually find them hard to finish, unless they
are very bare like Tandoor with not much content at
all, repetitive and endless. Dernshous to me feels like
half of a normal free-roam space game. I often don’t
know how to continue working on these games because
there’s so much to make, but there was something I
liked about the emptiness of Tandoor, the desert setting
appeals to me a lot, I decided to leave it the way it was.
My room-to-room games pop up online more because
they are easier to finish and be able to call ‘games’. I’ve
also become interested in how strong an atmosphere

can be created with little amount of mechanics or level, and
mostly only images and sounds. I really like Bulfus game
cave’ ( link) which is a good example of why I like the room-
to-room style. I’m becoming more confident in not worrying
about whether my game is or isn’t a game, so I guess that is
why I am uploading more open ended wanderers.

Zolani: Isn’t bulfus stuff great? Especially cave. It’s such a
mezmerizing experience. He’s definitely taking a style up
from your earlier games, his influences are clear but he’s
making these things that are much darker, literally darker!
and heavy with this really ethereal and textured use of photo
and paper, and what seems to be black crayon. And cave is a
game that captures that slowness you talk about, so so well. It’s
walk speed is just a magnitude slower than what you would
be comfortable with, and that’s actually how I’d describe some
your room-to-room games as well. I think he only started
making games last year but I’m really looking forward to
whatever he comes up with.

So I want to talk about this venture into 3D you’ve made. I’m
interested in knowing how you got to working with Tom on
Bernband/Hernhand, because Bernband is probably the best
thing Tom has ever put out, in my opinion. He does something
really special with that space.

Jake: I really like Bernband , I agree that it’s Tom’s best so far
and does great work with sound and space. I wanted to make
a 3D game after I saw some early footage of Bernband that
Tom put on youtube, it was really amazing to see, it was just
like his other work except gone 3D all of a sudden. I had been
wanting to do 3D for a while but I always assumed it’d be
really difficult to learn and work with. So I tried out Unity
and found out you can do basic stuff very easily, it has a set
of default 3D objects like cubes and cylinders which you can
scale up and move around to create simple levels. Tom and I
decided to do a collaboration, and we decided to make our

first 3D games while sharing our work and progress.

Zolani: I found Bernband to be the sort of.. Angel game to
Hernhand’ s devilness, if that doesn’t sound corny. Bernband
is a really pleasant and smooth experience, and it looks great
too. But playing Hernhand was * stressful*, it was confusing,
and your approach to textures and model-sprites was jarring,
if also compelling in the weird way you textured and lighted
that space. I explored Bernband all over but I could barely
navigate Hernhand, I’m sure I didn’t explore nearly as much.

Jake : Yes I’m sure Hernhand is probably a horrible experience
in comparison, especially to people familiar with games
and pixel work. I wanted my game to be gritty and I guess
unattractive, I like the idea of it being its own way and not
worrying about how it looks to someone else. I also found
the 3D very exciting, so I didn’t mind/kind of enjoyed having
bad MS Paint textures. I also liked how saving .jpeg hies adds
a little roughness to the surface of the image. That made the
textures have a bit of a bumpy surface look, like concrete or
something. I guess I wanted Hernhand to be a dirty and a
noisy place, I wanted it to be like the grubby corner under a
bridge where you don’t really go for picnics. I also enjoy how
most of the game is hidden unless you spend a bit of time
wandering around, which most people haven’t I’m sure.

So I was interested in doing what Bernband was doing,
focusing on the areas you’re in and exploration rather than
a gameplay objective, in my opinion I don’t think adding an
interactive mechanic would make the game better, or would
add anything, as I am mostly interested in the game working
it’s own way and the player being a small part of things, an
observer.

Zolani: Was it hard making Hernhand ? Did you have trouble
working out what you wanted?

Jake: It wasn’t difficult making Hernhand, I only used the
default cubes and shapes to do all the levels. It was so much
fun!

Zolani: What is it that you’d like to do with yourself, Jake, after all this? Because you
have huge repitoire now. You’ve made a lot of things. And if I remember correctly from
your old blog, you should be 20 years old, which is basically the same age as I am. So
what’s going on with you now, and what are you looking to do?

Jake : Yes I am 20, and at the moment I want to continue exploring ideas and making
what I feel like making. I am about to start university this year and I’m going to learn all
about making art. I like the idea of making dioramas, sets and models to use in games,
because they can also be their own separate works, and I find that appealing.

Zolani : That’s all I wanted to go over, Jake, thanks so much for talking with me.

Jake : Thanks a lot for the questions and interest, and hope you have a good time at

school and university!

Jake Clover is a gamemaker and artist who hails from Melbourne ,
Australia , and is, arguably, one of the most influential freeware and
small game makers of the last five years. His work is numerous,
spanning across genres and styles. You can play all his games, including
his collaborations and compilations, on his Gamejolt Page . Thank

you for speaking with us, Jake!

Index

Sext Adventure

Of course, there are some people (many, even) who have, for any number of wholly justified
reasons, been spared from the unique anxiety of always being plugged into a system. Yet I hope,
regardless if you’re a Better-Never or a Never-Better about all this, that this personalization
of technology is evident even without having experienced it first-hand. I’m compelled, here,
to bring up the matter of the widely publicized Apple Watch as a new peak in this trend;
it’s another device in the ever-shifting world of computing, yet is marketed (perhaps more
than any other technology product) as a timeless fashion item — a highly visible (and costly)

expression of personal style through consumer electronics.

2:22 am

1. Reed Morano, Cinematographer Reed Morano on the Fight Against TV’s “Smooth Motion ”
Setting, 2014

2. Lulu Blue, Modesty , Decadence , and The Machine , 2014

3. Colette Conroy, Theatre And The Body , 2010

4. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation In The South , 1890-
1940, 1998

The Illogical Journey of The Zambonis

1. In 1991, TToe New York Times called Carmen Sandiego, “the red-haired grand larcenist who
is to personal computer games what the Mario Brothers are to Nintendo.”

2. Broderbund Software History , Funding Universe.

3. The term “edutainment” is dated. Now, it is rarely used unironically, and almost always
as a pejorative. The word suggests sleazy commodification of knowledge, rote drilling and
memorization exercises incentivized by flashy extrinsic rewards. This, however, was not
always the case. From Jimmy Maher’s The Digital Antiquarian: Apple, Carmen Sandiego , and

the Rise of Edutainment:

“For all the early rhetoric about computers and education, one could argue that the real golden
age of the Apple II as an educational computer didn’t begin until about 1983 or 1984. By that
time a new category of educational software, partly a marketing construct but partly a genuinely
new thing, was becoming more and more prominent: edutainment. Trip Hawkins, founder of

Page 68

Electronic Arts, has often claimed to have invented the portmanteau for EAs 1984 title Seven
Cities of Gold, but this is incorrect; a company called Milliken Publishing was already using
the label for their programs for the Atari 8-bit line in late 1982, and it was already passing into
common usage by the end of 1983. Edutainment dispensed with the old drill- and-practice model
in preference to more open, playful forms of interactions that nevertheless promised, sometimes
implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to teach. The skills they taught, meanwhile, were generally
not the rigid, disembodied stuff of standardized tests but rather embedded organically into living
virtual worlds. ..Its of course true that a plain old game that requires a degree of thoughtfulness and
a full-on work of edutainment can be very hard to disentangle from one another. Like so much else
in life, the boundaries here can be nebulous at best, and often had as much to do with marketing,
with the way a title was positioned by its owner, as with any intrinsic qualities of the title itself.
When we go looking for those intrinsics, we can come up with only a grab bag of qualities of which
any given edutainment title was likely to share a subset: being based on real history or being a
simulation of some real aspect of science or technology; being relatively nonviolent; emphasizing
thinking and logical problem-solving rather than fast reflexes. Like pornography, edutainment is
something that many people seemed to just know when they saw it.”

4. Megan Murray and Brian King. Review of Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. Math Equity.

TERC.edu.

The Castle Doctrine: Neighborhood Bondage

1. Alec Meer, Impressions , Part 1: Jason Rohrers The Castle Doctrine , Rock, Paper, Shotgun,
March 7, 2013, November 28, 2014,

2. Leigh Alexander, The strange , sad anxiety of Jason Rohrers The Castle Doctrine , Gamasutra.
August 6, 2013, November 28, 2014

3. Stephen Beirne, Fixing The Castle Doctrines Self-Defense Parable , Gameranx, January 23,
2014, November 28, 2014,

4. Cameron Kunzelman, On Why I Will Never Play The Castle Doctrine \ This Cage is Worms,
Wordpress, July 24, 2013, November 28, 2014,

5. Carolyn Petit, Exploring the Ethics of The Castle Doctrine , Gamespot. August 2, 2013,
November 28, 2014,

6. Russ Pitts, 7 he Castle Doctrine Review: Foe Great Watt ? Polygon, January 31, 2014,
November 28, 2014,

7. Jason Rohrer. Addressing some confusion , thecastledoctrine, July 24, 2013, November 28,
2014,

8. Susan Fraiman, Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye, New
Literary History, 37, no. 2 (spring 2006): 341-359.

9. Ibid.

Page 69

10. Pat Rogers, “Crusoe’s Home,” Essays in Criticism 24, no. 4 (1974): 379.

11. jcr!3. Game Trailer: Toe Castle Doctrine. Y outube .January 20, 2014, November 28,
2014

12. Stephen H. Gregg, Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men (Farnham, England:
Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), 64.

13. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (Pennsylvania State University, 2012), 133.

14. Pat Rogers, Crusoe s Home , Essays in Criticism 24, no. 4 (1974): 388.

15. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (Pennsylvania State University, 2012), 139.

16. Ibid. 138.

17. Richard Meyer, Imagining Sadomasochism: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Masquerade of
Photography, Qui Parle, 4, no. 1, (fall 1990): 72.

18. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-
Century American Art (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002), 193.

19. Ibid. 193.

20. Ibid. 192.

21. Ibid. 185.

22. George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and Karl Robert Gutschera, Characteristics of
Games. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) 31-35.

23. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in Twentieth-
Century American Art, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002), 192.

24. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, (London: Routledge, 1993),
42.

25. Voorhees, Gerald. Identification or Desire?: Taking the Player-Avatar Relationship to the
Next Level . First Person Scholar. May 28, 2014. November 28, 2014

Page 70

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Ansh Patel (@lightnarcissus)

Contributors

Joseph DiZoglio (@JoeyDiZoglio)

Special Thanks

Tom Van Den Boogart
Solon Scott
Zoya Street
Tyvon Thomas

Our cover was designed and illustated by
Jordan Speer. You can view his artwork at
jordanspeerart.tumblr.com. Thank You, Jordan!

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